Earthquake in Virginia; also felt in Toronto

An earth­quake mea­sur­ing in at 5.9 mag­ni­tude, hit Vir­ginia (epicentre) at approx­i­mately 17:51:03 GMT. I am writ­ing this post from my office at Ryer­son Uni­ver­sity, Toronto, Ontario, where we also felt the ground move beneath us.… Okay, to be frank, I didn’t feel any­thing. But my class­mates and col­leagues have reported that they felt the earthquake. Now, the rea­son why I am post­ing about this, is not exactly because I think the earth­quake was that sig­nif­i­cant and worth men­tion­ing. I would like to share with you a lit­tle map that I cre­ated a few weeks ago. It lives on my server in what I like to call my “test­ing space”. The map acquires a GEOXML feed from USGS and plots the earth­quakes as they occur (real-time), and they stay on the map for a length of 24 hours. This is a great appli­ca­tion for visu­al­iz­ing the spa­tial dis­tri­b­u­tion of earth­quakes around the world. You can imag­ine the smile on my face when I saw Vir­ginia light up with a new earth­quake… the same earth­quake that has every­one and their moth­ers talk­ing about it.

I mean… at least I think its neat… It def­i­nitely depicts the “infor­ma­tion” por­tion of the “geo­graph­i­cal infor­ma­tion system”

Map Here!

Be patient… it needs to load a lot of earth­quake data!

For those of you who will be read­ing this more than 24 hours from now, I have included a screen­shot of the map as it looks right now (time of posting) at the top of the page.