Using World Wind
The EarthQuake Plug-In
In versions of NASA World Wind 1.34 and above the earthquake plug in is automatically installed with the program. If you are running an earlier version here is a link to the plug-in web site where it can be downloaded and installed onto you computer. The Plug in has two separate parts a "seven day list: of recent earthquakes and a historical earthquake data base.
Much of the following information is taken from the Earth Is Square web site at http://www.earthissquare.com/WorldWind/index.php
Historical Earthquake Survey
The second of the two earthquake plug-in is the USGS Historical Query Plug-In. With this plug-in you can query USGS earthquake data all the way back to 1973.
The Historical Earthquake query can be accessed by clicking on the plug in menu and selecting the historical earthquake query option. this will bring up the control screen for the earthquake query.
Search Method- Allows you to focus your earthquake search in one of three ways
Global search- will look for earthquakes across the entire globe
Rectangular search- Allows you to define a rectangle in which historical earth quakes will be queried. the dimensions of the rectangle can types in by hand or generated by drawing a box on the globe.
Radial search- allows you to define a circle in which earthquakes will be queried. you can type in the center point and radius or select the center of the circle in World Wind
Search limiters- allows to limit which earthquake are displayed based on different parameters.
Starting Year - Month - Day - Set the earliest date for which earthquakes will be displayed
Ending Year- Month- Day - set the latest date for which an earthquake is displayed
Min - Max Depth - defines at depth range you want to display earthquakes
Min - Max Magnitude - defines the magnitude of the earthquakes that are displayed.
Once the search is conducted the symbols will appear on the globe. On the query panel a count of how many earthquakes were found is displayed as well of a list of the five largest earthquakes.
And your World Wind globe will look like this:
The results have a different appearance than the RSS plug-in. The colors again relate to age and the size is related to the magnitude. But what is new are the shapes, the shapes are related to the depths the earthquakes happened.
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