A pretty cool Flash-based application.

This morning, there was a small (magnitude 3.1) earthquake in the Santa Cruz Mountains 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 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 homepage.

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