Visualizing the Ridgecrest earthquakes
Fast, offline data visualization with Kepler.gl + Atlas
By: Adam Koeppel
On the 4th of July, a magnitude 6.4 earthquake hit Ridgecrest, CA followed by a magnitude 7.1 earthquake the next day. There have been 649 earthquakes of magnitude 3.0 or greater since the 4th. Seismologists expect 34,000 aftershocks.
That’s a lot of earthquakes. I wanted to see what that looks like, so I made a visualization with Kepler.gl. First, I grabbed recent earthquake data from the USGS. Then I dropped it into Kepler.gl:
Point data by magnitude saturates the visualization:
But the heatmap shows the incredible earthquake density:
Switching to a time series view let me visualize the sustained and intense activity:
Kepler.gl let me build this Ridgecrest Earthquake visualization in a few minutes, without writing any code. And since we integrated Kepler.gl with Mapbox Atlas, the on-premises version of the Mapbox platform, I created this visualization entirely offline.
With Atlas, emergency responders can create Kepler.gl visualizations on-premises or offline. They can visualize location data during disaster recovery exercise in air-gapped emergency operations centers. After an earthquake, they can deploy Atlas at field command centers and coordinate response teams — regardless of damaged or destroyed communications infrastructure.
Kepler.gl for Atlas will ship as an included feature with Atlas Standard or Atlas Enterprise. Contact sales to start a free Atlas trial.
