You ’re looking at the latest work ofJohn Nelson , who is becoming well known for mix raw - tragedy data with brilliant visualisation . The Michigan - based designer first capture our aid witha series of rattling maps of U.S. tornado data . Now , he ’s used his endowment to graph a century ’s worth of earthquake ( a staggering 203,186 of them ) across the globe .
https://gizmodo.com/six-decades-of-u-s-tornadoes-visualized-in-one-stunnin-5915324
Nelson tells io9 that he made the mapping because he and his employer , IDV Solutions , are concerned in visualizing risk .
“ ordinarily we focus on more punctuated effect like a derived terrorism qui vive or a specific weather event or even a forced entry at a facility , ” he explain . “ Though lately I ’ve wanted to visualise big sets of data for an denotation of worldwide geographic trends in experiential risk . The earthquakes map and the tornado tracks map are examples of that . ”
The single-valued function have attracted a lot of attention in the last several months , and with good rationality — this is data visualization done right . That enunciate , Nelson state he ’s been surprised at the excitement that his mathematical function have get , “ particularly since there is nothing really new about the data point , ” which he get from in public approachable database maintained by NASA , USGS and NCEDC .
But in looking at the function , it becomes clear why they ’ve garnered such a incontrovertible response . Nelson ’s done more than make old data new again ; he ’s made it a delight to behold . He calls this giving the datum “ a little cartographic sizzle . ” And when it make out to the married couple of science and design , a little sizzle can go a foresighted direction . “ A visually interesting presentation buys the currency of a second look , ” he says .
A second ( or even third ) flavor , in act , buy the spectator an even deeper understanding of the information being presented . When you examine this single-valued function ( click here for Aloha State - res ) , the first affair you accredit is that it ’s beautiful . Then you probably acknowledge that the majority of the temblor incline to occur along pretty unequivocal borders . Many of you believably even recognized that these borders , in fact , make up the familiar boundaries ofEarth ’s architectonic plate .
The longer you linger on the image , the more you begin to mark . “ If diachronic epicenter were floaties , ” notes Nelsonon his web log , “ you could walk from Seattle to Wellington . ” Most of the quakes incline to appear alongThe Ring of Fire , a hotbed of geologic activity that girdles the basin of the Pacific Ocean . And what about all those thousands of point of spark that are nowhere near the bounds of a tectonic plate ? Seismologists call these “ intraplate earthquakes , ” and nobody ’s solely sure why they hap . ( BoingBoing ’s Maggie Koerth - Bakertracked downthis helpful listof suggest mechanism for intraplate earthquakes , good manners of UC Berkeley . )
These are the thing you find when presented with good datavisualization . These are the seeds of enquiry that are planted when straightforward design concepts , large stores of data , and a little attention to aesthetics become one .
[ ViaIDV User Experience ]
EarthquakesGeologyinfo pornmapsScience
Daily Newsletter
Get the best technical school , science , and culture news in your inbox daily .
word from the hereafter , delivered to your present .
You May Also Like
