This week’s topic: Earthquakes
There’s always a lot of news going on, but one of the biggest, and most horrifying, stories from the last few weeks is the massive earthquake that affected Turkey and Syria, with the initial shock taking place on February 6th. As of this writing, more than 40,000 people have died; I can only begin to imagine the even greater number who are now injured, homeless, or out of work.
The reports that I’ve been reading led me to wonder: How frequently do earthquakes occur? How strong are they normally? Was this one unusually strong?
For this week’s newsletter, I decided to dig into information about earthquakes. The US Geological Survey, a scientific research agency that’s part of the Department of the Interior, offers many tools and data sets for anyone interested in learning more about this subject.
For this week’s data, I went to the USGS page that lets you search their earthquake catalog. I chose to see earthquakes with a minimum magnitude of 2.5, between January 1st, 2000 and today (February 15, 2023). I asked to see all data, from all all over the world. I chose the CSV output option, and ended up with the following URL:
That gives us a data set of more than 8,000 earthquakes from all over the world, for more than 20 years, which should be enough to ask and answer some interesting questions:
- Read the downloaded CSV file (which will be called `query.csv`, but which I renamed to `earthquake-data.csv` on my computer) into Pandas.
- How many seismic events take place each year? In which of the last 20 years did we have the greatest number of such events?