NOTE TO TEACHERS: 
These procedures are written to show you how you might use these technologies to teach science concepts. Suggested questions, approaches, and expected answers are all provided. Therefore, these activity descriptions should be used as a guide for your instructional planning, rather than as step-by-step directions for students.

Getting Started

Where are some places in the world where you've heard of earthquakes occurring?

When we hear about earthquakes in the United States, many of them seem to be occurring in the Pacific Coast states. It seems from what we hear in the media that earthquakes are concentrated in certain areas of the world.

Is this a real pattern or just an artifact of selective reporting by the media?

Are earthquakes distributed evenly around the globe or concentrated in specific areas?

One way to find out would be to plot lots of real earthquake data on a map of the world to see where they are occurring.

Accessing the Data

The earthquake database utilized in this activity is available at the United States Geological Survey (USGS) National Earthquake Information Center web site (http://neic.usgs.gov/neis/epic/epic.html). You can access the earthquake database by clicking on Earthquake Search in the bulleted list.

Scroll down to Select the Search Area and select Global (Worldwide). Select Output Format: 3. Screen file format of 80 columns, then scroll down the screen to the Optional Search Parameters.

Obviously, you can't work with all the earthquake data ever collected, so you need to work with a practical data set. You might find it interesting to select the earthquake data from your birthdate.

If you were born April 26, 1986, you would set the parameters as follows and click on Submit Search:

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