An early morning earthquake shook the central coast of Chile today, killing over 700 people and injuring thousands more. The Magnitude and location of the quake prompted tsunami warnings throughout the Pacific. The details are as follows:

2010/02/27 06:34:14 (UTC)
Preliminary Magnitude: 8.8
Latitude: -36.1 Longitude: -72.6
Location: near the coast of central Chile

It is interesting to see the differences between the 1960 (9.5) and 2010 (8.8) events. Both examples are drawn on Mercator projections, where rhumb lines are drawn as straight lines. The linear scale is constant in all directions around any point and preserves the angles and shapes of small objects. This is useful for plotting paths but it distorts the size and shape of large objects, exaggerating the size of objects far from the equator. This would likely have a magnifying effect on the visualization of seismic events at the poles.

I wonder if NOAA has a sphere with the ability to display these events in their proper proportion?

Tsunami:

(See also: Chilean Tsunami energy map)
(See also: Tsunami Advisory: Sat Feb 27 22:48:29 GMT 2010)
(See also: Tsunami Advisory: XML)

(See also: NOAA Center for Tsunami Research)
(See also: NOAA: Chilean event)

(See also: Carleton: Ocean System: Data, Models and Visualization)
(See also: Oregon State: Tsunami Visualization)
(See also: PDF: Data Visualization Strategies for Tsunami Research)

Earthquake:

(See also: NYTimes: ‘State of Catastrophe’ After Chile Quake)
(See also: NYTimes: Underwater Plate Cuts 400-Mile Gash)
(See also: NYTimes: Maps of the Chile Earthquake)

(See also: USGS: Historic World Earthquakes)
(See also: USGS Worldwide Deadly & Destructive Earthquakes between Magnitudes 6 and 8)

Finished the book. Review in progress, somewhere between zero and infinity. Each chapter begins with a quote to set the tone. Here is my favorite:

“When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind: it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science. “

- William Thomson, Lord Kelvin

This is largely the problem traditional HPC sciences have with Life Sciences. Apart from statistical analysis, we simply haven’t risen to the level where we can express biological systems numerically.

(See also: amazon: Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea)
(See also: wikipedia: Charles Seife)
(See also: Charles Seife)

(See also: amazon: The Nothing that Is: A Natural History of Zero, by Robert Kaplan)