Institute For The Future

"Shakemovie, the future of science"

I'm only half joking with the title of the post. When I was at Britannica, I spent forever trying to commission a set of 3D visualizations of earthquakes; for various reasons, the project never went anywhere. Tonight I discovered that a Caltech site publishes visualizations of earthquakes in near real time.

 

Caltech's Near Real Time Simulation of Southern California Seismic Events Portal. This portal has been designed to present the public with near real time visualizations of recent significant seismic events in the Southern California Region. These movies are the results of simulations carried out on a large computer cluster. Earthquake movies will be available for download approximately 45 mins after the occurrence of a quake of magnitude 3.5 or greater.

 

As they explain, the data comes from the Southern California Earthquake Data Center, which maintains several hundred earthquake monitoring stations (here's a map of the array); the data is then run through a 3D wave simulation, and a movie is generated.

 

It's an example of what interesting things you can do with real-time environmental data, ample processing power, and an Internet connection. And it's easy to imagine in which amateur scientists create things like this, or environmental groups generate visualizations of deforestation or soil erosion, or neighborhood activists create movies highlighting local polluters. Just as warfare has been remade into an asymmetrical activity, so too can one see a future in which something similar happens in (at least some of) the sciences.

 

[via Jill's notebook]