What is the idea behind the World-Wide Earthquake Locator v6.0?
The World-Wide Locator was originally developed by Bruce M. Gittings at the University of Edinburgh in 1994-95. Thereafter, the project has been revitalized through various dissertation projects by MSc GIS students. The latest version, v6.0, has been written by Christian Boermel with the aim to upgrade the underlying technology and to strengthen the human geography dimension.
What happened to the features of the old earthquake locator, e.g. prediction data?
Due to time constraints and a more
dissertation-focused approach, not all features of the old World-Wide Earthquake Locator have been transferred. The earthquake prediction section has been
omitted on purpose, as the algorithm which was being run appeared to be broken. Future projects may re-implement these features. Meanwhile, you can access the
old earthquake locator
here.
Why are there more small earthquakes shown in the U.S. than anywhere else?
When displaying the USGS data feeds, earthquakes with a magnitude below 4.0 are only displayed in North America. This is due to the excellent network of seismological stations established by the USGS, which registers and publishes the data on these smaller earthquakes. While other earthquake monitoring institutes outside of Americamay well register earthquakes below 4.0, this data is not centrally published. Therefore, only significant earthquake are shown for other places in the world. In future, more data sources might be aggregated to provide a more balanced view.
Why is there no Pacific-centred view?
Unfortunately, it is very difficult to display vector data across the dateline, i.e. to provide a continuous view to the left and right of the dateline. This is a clear limitation of OpenLayers and I hope this will be resolved in the future. The only work-around option currently available would require triple the amount of data, i.e. to make copies, which would severely impact the performance of this web application.
What browsers support the World-Wide Earthquake Locator?
The World-Wide Earthquake Locator has been optimized for all web standards supporting browsers. Optimization and debugging was done with Opera Dragonfly. The following browsers are tested and fully compatible:
- Opera 10+
- Firefox 3.6 +
- Chrome 10+
- Safari 5+
- Internet Explorer 9
Incompatible browsers:
- Internet Explorer 6
- Internet Explorer 7
- Internet Explorer 8 (being worked on)
Are there any known bugs?
The list of known bugs to date:
- Popups stay 'freeze': Sometimes, popups will not disappear after clicking on an earthquake. The only solution currently is to refresh the page.
- Google Satellite tiles are not shown: When zooming, the base layers sometime remain blank. Solution: By panning a little bit the tiles will be displayed immediately.
- Drawing a rectangle for the spatial extend has to start at the upper left corner, otherwise the vertices get confused.
What is the idea behind the World-Wide Earthquake Locator v6.0?