Going Further

Examples of datasets that can be investigated with the techniques of this chapter include: stream flow conditions, global land and sea surface temperatures, and many others with latitude and longitude coordinates, such as those gathered with a GPS. Specifically, data from the EET chapters Exploring Regional Differences in Climate Change and Using GLOBE data to investigate the Earth System can be brought into ArcView/ArcVoyager using the same procedures as in Parts 1 and 2 of this chapter.

Instead of limiting the data to the high magnitude earthquakes, one could investigate the low magnitude earthquakes.

Consider investigating other relationships in the earthquake data. Some questions to investigate might include:

• Where are really deep earthquakes located? Where are really shallow earthquakes located? Is there a relationship between depth and plate boundaries?
  
  
• Is there a relationship between the magnitude of an earthquake and its depth?

China Data

On May 12, 2008 a magnitude 7.9 earthquake struck near the city of Chengdu.

This file contains just the 7.9 magnitude earthquake.

May 12 Earthquake near Chengdu (Comma Separated Values 107bytes May13 08)

This file contains May 12 and May 13 Earthquakes with a Magnitude of 5.0 or greater.

Recent Earthquakes (Comma Separated Values 2kB May13 08)

Here is a link to some shape files for China.

China Shapefiles

Here is an article about the quake from ScienceNOW:

Chinese Quake Likely a Mega-Catastrophe

Here are two sample hotlink files:

For Mac (Comma Separated Values 161bytes May13 08)
For PC (Comma Separated Values 156bytes May13 08)

Exploring a Year's Worth of Earthquakes (Symbolizing Earthquakes by Magnitude)

1. Go to the USGS Earthquake cite and download all the earthquakes that took place during the past year. (If needed, refer to Part 1 for help.)
2. Using the procedures in Part 2, format the earthquake data and save it as a comma-separated values (.csv) file.
3. Launch AEJEE and Open the EQ_EET.axl Project File.
4. 

   Choose View>Add Event Theme to map the earthquakes from Last_year_eq.csv. Navigate to where the file is located. Then select the Longitude field for the X field and the Latitude filed for the Y field. Change the Output Directory to /ESRI/AEJEE/Data/Earthquake and click OK. All of the earthquakes are shown as the same size and same color, regardless of their magnitude.






5. Symbolize the earthquakes by magnitude so that the higher magnitude earthquakes are larger in size. Right-click on the PC or control-click on the Mac on the earthquake layer in the Table of Contents. Then select Properties . Change the symbols property from One Symbol to Graduated symbols. Select Magnitude as the field to Map. Accept the default settings by clicking Apply. Then Click OK. The map should now show Earthquake symbols of five different sizes.
6. Experiment with changing the number of classes used to symbolize magnitude or with changing the classification method.