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Shallow earthquake depth distribution, 7 running days
This chart below shows a scatter plot of earthquakes as reported by the USGS, magnitude versus depth over a 7 day period.
Most sampled earthquakes here are not that deep – under 50 kilometers. According to USGS, shallow ones are classified as 70km or below, and that’s still pretty deep!
What’s curious about the scatter plot below is this cluster of rather deep, powerful M4-5 quakes. They seem to stand out rather clearly.
As it turns out, they’re geographically near each other: 13 are near Fiji, 3 near Japan, 1 near East Timor, 5 near Vanuatu, and 2 near Indonesia.
USGS has a pretty neat writeup on how they measure the depth (waveform analysis.)
The above depth distribution shows only a partial picture of things, the most frequent and shallow earthquakes. Bigger picture is that max range goes down to 700 kilometers below the surface for some of the deepest earthquakes. Lastly, a magnitude distribution from this sample shows that big ones are few and far in between.
Clik here to view.
Earthquake full depth distribution, 7 running days
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Earthquake magnitude distribution, 7 running days
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