Maps are a blank canvas on steroids, showing places, distances, (cor)relations… They're powerful communication tools if you're enabled to use them liberally. I love throwing data on top of maps and looking for patterns🕵🏻. I did an exercise on the seams of Earth, tectonic plates!
You can find tectonic plates on every physical Earth globe (maybe there’s one with relief in your junk room). But how cool is it that you can see how earthquakes are distributed along with tectonic plates, so clearly that they hide them?
Wait, what happens in China, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan area? 😱
That area is very active but not on top of other tectonic plate lines, like most of the rest of the world 🧐
As usual, the reality is complex, and the visualization helps us understand that there are multiple reasons for earthquakes in the area, from faults to human hands!
The article about hand-made earthquakes led me to another outlier, a point in India that happened to be around a dam:
Bonus: not only earthquakes align with tectonic plates, the seams also open the Earth internals through volcanoes!
Of course, all this comes from a Felt map 🙂
felt.com/map/The-seams-of-Earth-JSUHLLtqTUGhjMUg9CjGi8D
There’s a countless amount of layers to stack on top of a map! Crime and social investment? Earthquakes and fracking? At Felt, we want both to provide as many useful layers to users but also allow them to load and play with their own. Join! felt.com/