Your Objective

Use earthquake data from a divergent plate boundaries in ocean regions off of the Pacific Northwest to determine what relationships of earthquakes along the boundary over time.

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Data Tips

When the site loads, you are able to see all of the earthquake data from the last two weeks in May 2013 throughout the Coastal Endurance Array. You can interact with the data by:

Note, the color denotes earthquake depth, with darker blues representing deeper depths (up to 50km) and dark red representing shallower depths (0km). The yellows are in-between. The circles on the map are sized by the earthquake magnitude.

Questions for Thought

Orientation Questions
  • Across what geographic area are you able to observe earthquake data in this map?
  • What is the range of earthquake magnitudes in these data?
  • Where do you see the largest earthquakes and the smallest earthquakes along the plate boundary?
Interpretation Questions
  • What is the relationship between earthquake size (magnitude) and location over time along this divergent plate boundary from 2013-14?
  • What is your evidence of the relationship?
  • How does this relationship support, or lack of relationship challenge, what you previously knew about features at divergent plate boundaries?
  • What questions do you still have about features at divergent plate boundaries?

Background Information

Click on the images below to learn more about where and how the dataset above was collected.

Dataset Information

Data for this activity were retrieved from the USGS Earthquake Catalog.