Earthquakes - Exploring our website data - Part one.

We quite often get queries (via email and facebook) wondering on how many earthquakes a particular area gets, and 'was there an earthquake yesterday' etc.  and more recently we have had lots of questions regarding Christchurch!   I will do a series of posts on how to find and use the data within our website which will hopefully help you answer those questions now and in the future.

You all know we get a large amount of earthquakes in New Zealand every year (we locate over 15,000!) we only put the larger/more widely felt earthquakes onto our 'recent quakes' page (or else it would be chocka!)  Now we aren't hiding anything, you can access all of our data via our website!   We have heaps of cool things for you to look at on our website via the 'Resources' tab, here are a couple ..

Quake Search  CLICK HERE
This lets you search in a particular area, date and size of earthquake.
1 - Draw a box around the area of NZ you are interested in. (or you can put in the coordinates)
2 - Select the time frame - note. UTC = Universal time = at the moment is 13hrs behind NZ time.
3 - If you are interested in quakes of a certain size, put the magnitude in here.
4 - Output: you can choose * CSV= spreadsheet, Here you get all the guff -  numbers, mag, depth etc
     *Map (with or without towns) and * KML - which will open up in Google Earth.

Here is an example of all of the earthquakes in Canterbury from March 1st until the 14th: