The below just in the last few days:
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Quakes/quakes_big.php
A chart I put together using data from USGS. The column for 2011 is projected based on the number of 5+ earthquakes in the first quarter of this year. I would expect a significant drop in the number projected for 2011 but I am starting to wonder about it!
Darn interesting graph, Errant. Thanks for sharing it. Hopefully, there will be a decline rather than in increase on your next one. Let us pray that be the case, anyway, and pray that God supply for and comfort those who are in need. Whether it be 1 or 1 million.
I am in Mississippi and situated just a few miles away from a community that was almost entirely destroyed in April (Smithville, MS). And about an hour from Tuscaloosa, AL that, too, lost so many precious lives by the tornadoes rated EF-5. All still so fresh and I think we all know what it feels like to have loved ones in a region stricken with a catastrophe.
Again, thanks for posting your chart. Nice work!
My Best,
SC
P.S. Like you, I am “beginning to wonder” myself considering so much damage in so short a time, but then again it may just be me being overly sensitive to disasters considering what I wrote to you above.
The number is skewed by the aftershocks of the Japan earthquake, that are occurring in the region of the densest seismic network in the world.
The “Boxing Day” 2004 earthquake with it’s tsunami and massive loss of life may just have initiated something with the plates. I was skeptical but the Japanese monster has me thinking.
Is this simply better and more thorough measurement?
Did you correct for the changing definition of magnitude?