OSINT At Home #17 – How to map seismic data and earthquakes
xRrCvWlzdEI • 2023-02-17
Transcript preview
Open
Kind: captions
Language: en
[Music]
foreign
and welcome back to this series on how
to do open source investigations from
home I'm Ben and this is part 17. so
let's get started
[Music]
in this session we're going to learn how
to map seismic data using Google Earth
or qgis and freely available information
to start this session off like most good
bits of research we start with Google
and we can simply type in
something called USGS seismic data what
we're hoping to find after typing in
USGS seismic data is the search
earthquake catalog this is the
earthquake catalog from USGS and it
enables us to start to think about what
sort of data we want to get our hands on
and it allows us to categorize the data
before we download it
on this search catalog we've got some
basic options such as type of magnitude
we might be looking for whether it's 2.5
Plus or over 4.5 and we can even go
custom as well we can select our time
frame so for this one I'm going to go
through the past 30 days and we also
have world and we can also select the
geographic region for this one I'm
actually going to go custom
and because of recent events I'm going
to have a look over turkey and Syria and
collect data from this region
I can easily draw a box which allows me
to select the area that I want to pull
the magnitude data from or the seismic
data if we go through advanced outputs
we can see those coordinates that we set
up in that box we can also have a look
at depth but we can also go through
event type as well a lot of this data
isn't worldwide so some of the more
finite data such as
mining explosions or Quarry explosions
mind collapse and things like that very
much US based but we're going to go for
the earthquakes and earthquake data so
I'll leave that on event type and we can
also have a go through some of those
other things
for the output options the first one I
want to show you is the map and list
function so we've selected our data and
I want to have a look at the map and
list option so all we have to do for
that is Click search
so as we can see the data for
earthquakes has loaded here and we can
see this laid out on a map it also has
the plate boundaries that we can see
here and we can even click on things
such as population density and other
options and we can even go to a
satellite view so this map if you didn't
want to put it into Google Earth or you
didn't want to drag it into qgis is so
useful like this and we can also even
have a look at our world data as well
which is a really easy way to just view
where the strong points are or where
there's been a lot of seismic activity
over the past and again we can also fuse
that population density data in there
and follow along with those plate
boundaries so that's just one of the
options that we've got to use what I
really want to get by hands on is a KML
we can also go a CSV or geojson but I'm
going to go at KML because I'm going to
load this in Google Earth for the KML
specific options we can have a look at
color by age or color by depth and we
can order it by time so newest or oldest
or even magnitude largest I might go the
magnitude largest first
all I have to do is Click search
and that will generate my KML
that I can then load up in Google Earth
that's downloaded there so what I'm
going to do is open up my Google Earth
and I'm going to load that into here now
I can simply load that KML by dragging
it into a Google Earth folder usually
it's going to fly right back over to the
US but I want to keep that on my area
marked here which is where I pulled the
data from and what we can see is seismic
data in different magnitudes
the size is based upon the count of the
magnitude
so the bigger circles representing a
higher count and you can see these are
from some of the recent devastating and
terrible earthquakes that have happened
around turkey and impacting turkey and
Syria
and you can really go through some of
these and have a look at that
information up close
and this is really helpful to map
because we can also see what areas may
have been affected by those counts and
also where those humanitarian efforts
might be
we can see the legend that pops up on
the left there which allows us to
identify for size
magnitude but also the color as well
indicating whether it may have been the
past day so we have some activity that's
quite recent past week which is yellow
and older because this is a 30-day
collection in white that's really useful
that legend that pops up there so that
we can zoom around or fly around this
area of turkey and we can identify which
ones might be recent but also their
scale of size and magnitude so we can
see that this one's quite close between
the seven and eight it was a 7.5 that
happened in that area
and that also gives a really good
indication as to the area affected as
well to build on from this it's really
useful to think about how this sort of
data works with other data sets
so if we have a look at qgis which we
can also load the same data set into
here's an example map I've made of the
exact same data that I've loaded into
Google Earth which is that KML of
seismic data that I've pulled from the
USGS search earthquake catalog
and I've also layered that with Facebook
population data as well which is freely
available and linked to in the
description below and that allows me to
see not only the names of the areas but
also that recent population data just to
see where some of the areas may be
indicative of a high population and
where there may have been numerous lives
impacted upon as well as some of those
less crowded areas
and that's really useful for us to see
the density of some of those areas and
where large amounts of magnitude pings
have struck nearby highly built up areas
so for example we can see this area here
and we can see some of these areas up
here and around here as well and this is
just a good way to use freely available
data fusing two different data sets
together
to create a new visualization and
explore the power of visual storytelling
using different publicly available data
sets I hope you enjoyed this really
short tutorial I'll be seeing you in the
next session but to make sure you get
the notifications please hit that
subscribe button and I'll see you soon
[Music]
foreign
[Music]
Resume
Read
file updated 2026-02-12 02:34:52 UTC
Categories
Manage