Quake Analysis

The purpose of this quake analysis was to ascertain if there were correlations between undersea volcanic activity in Indonesia and the El Nino phenomena, and to determine correlations to the deep earthquake increases which has had an almost exponential increase over the past couple decades. The data used for this report is extracted from the CNSS Earthquake Catalog using the following search criteria:

catalog = CNSS
start_time = 19xx/01/01,00:00:00
end_time = 20xx/12/31,23:59:59
minimum_magnitude = 3.0
maximum_magnitude = 9
minimum_depth = 0
maximum_depth = 100
event_type = E

As you see, I excluded earthquakes Richter 1-3. I did this, because we've heard many comments over past years that earthquakes are not on the increase, and that more earthquakes are detected simply because there are more and more seismic stations installed, which detect more weak earthquakes. By doing this, I think, I avoided this comment. Also, since the data is from the CNSS Catalog, which is a union of reports from many seismic stations around the world, the Richter 3 earthquake data seems to be less than what was detectable in 1970 and not missed because of a few seismic stations less than today. Thus, in my analysis, this spotty data is dropped. The data for the present year is estimated, not actual (number of quakes in first 6 months multiplied by 2). All the data obtained from CNSS was imported into a database for easier running of queries.

Offered by Kiko.
May 17, 2000