A pretty cool Flash-based “application”:1.

[1(JPL 2005 Year in Images)]http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/2005images/index-flash.html

This morning, there was a small (magnitude 3.1) earthquake in the “Santa Cruz Mountains”:1 in the small town of Felton. More precisely, three miles NNE of Felton at 37.096N, 122.049W.

You can read all about the quake “here”:2 on the USGS site.

It’s amazing the kind of data that you can find almost instantaneously on quakes. A few minutes after I felt this one, I popped online to see if it had been registered at the USGS. Indeed it had.

I picked up the screenshot of the map above at the USGS’ “Recent Earthquakes in California and Nevada”:3 homepage.

If you want to report feeling a quake, you can do so “here”:4. From these reports, the USGS site also generates “response maps” of the quakes. “Here’s”:5 one for the Felton quake.

And finally, the USGS generates a couple of graphs analyzing the response data. The top is _intensity_ vs. _distance from the epicenter_ and the bottom is _number of responses_ vs. _the time since the earthquake_.

Sometimes the government works.

[6(Response data graphs)]http://pasadena.wr.usgs.gov/shake/ca/STORE/X40182398/40182398_graph.gif

[5(Felton quake response map)]http://pasadena.wr.usgs.gov/shake/ca/STORE/X40182398/ciim_display.html

[4(Did you feel it?)]http://pasadena.wr.usgs.gov/shake/ca/

[3(USGS recent CA and NV quakes page)]http://pasadena.wr.usgs.gov/recenteqs/

[2(Read all about the Felton quake at the USGS)]http://pasadena.wr.usgs.gov/recenteqs/Quakes/nc40182398.html

[1(Wikipedia on the Santa Cruz Mountains)]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Cruz_Mountains