Plate Boundary Features Application1
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.
- Make a prediction about what kind of patterns in earthquake magnitude and location you may observe over time along the boundary.
- Compare patterns in the data below to determine what and if there are relationships over time along the boundary.
Automatically select:
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:
- Selecting a different part of the time series to explore the data in ways that interest you by moving the highlighted section of the bottom graph to the right or left.
- Zooming in and out of the data to look at different time scales that interest you by changing the width of the highlighted section of the bottom graph (it loads with all of the data highlighted).
- Zooming in and out of the map to see more or less of the area of the ocean the earthquakes occurred.
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
- 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?
- 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.