Earthquake maps

There's been a number of earthquakes in the Solomon Islands over the past few days, including one that caused a tsunami to partially destroy the village of Baniata on Rendova, Western Provence. You can see exactly how many earthquakes have occurred there by heading over to http://maps.google.com and pasting into the search box this url: http://www.sdjbrown.110mb.com/equake.kml.

I created that map using data from the USGS Earthquake Hazard program and whipping up an R script to create the KML file. Up to that stage it was pretty easy. Creating the different icons was a little more difficult and required a crash course in the kml specifications, how they differ in Google maps and where to find icons for use in the map (and here too). All in all, it required too much playing around than I should really afford at the moment, but I ended up learning a lot of stuff. There's a number of other things which could be done with this setup, but I probably should go back to doing something important....