Lab 2. Morphing Mama Earth

Working together with Polly

The idea:

Creating a visualiser for historical earthquake data from the United States Geological Survey (USGS).

Motivation:

Is it us or does it seem that there are more and more natural disasters lately?

We could compare all the data existing from the last 20 or 30 years but that would be chaotic. To much data and too much different data and 30 years  ago the data gathered wasn't as accurate as it is now.

So we decided to focus on one sort of disastrous event: Earthquake.

These events have different parameters we can work with: intensity, depth and location.

With these 3 parameters we can visualize the impact through the years on planet Earth, using location, intensity and depth to morph the "Earth".

First trying the data on google earth:

Unfortunately morphing the earth would be a bit too difficult within the time frame we had, so we made an abstract visualisation of the historical data.

Inspiration

A seismograph is the standard equipment to plot the earthquake data and it is a direct mapping of the ground motion on a surface , usually a paper. We decided to utilise this technique on a digital medium, spice it up a bit and create a generative artwork. 

Application

The application loads the XML files taken from the USGS archives and plots an abstraction of the location, depth and magnitude of each earthquake on the screen.  

XMLSettings Library is utilised to load the earthquake data per year.  Data files are divided into separate years to save a memory and keep the application running at a reasonable frame rate.  On each year, the earthquake data is plotted one by one. Each line drawn on the screen is based on a combination of attributes from the data read from the XML file. I.E. White dots on the screen are the locations of the earthquake mapped on an imaginary globe, each line connecting one dot to the next is based on a combination of magnitude and the depth of the earthquake. 

Further Development

The application can be improved by adding more user interaction to the program such as selection of options for the data drawn on the screen (eg. year, earthquake magnitude, location, depth). Also to improve the visuals, shaders can be utilised to add sophisticated lighting effects. 

Source code for the application can be downloaded here...