Oklahoma Earthquakes.

Gary De Young
2016-01-30

The Ground is Shaking!

Until recently when people thought of where earthquakes occurred in the U.S. they did not think of Oklahoma! Earthquakes in the eastern 2/3's of the US were rare. Some occurring in the the Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky and Tenseness region, but very few in Oklahoma.

Majority of Quakes Today (mag 2 and larger) are:

  • In California: Mainly along the coast and some the Sierra mountains
  • In Oklahoma: Central/Northern Oklahoma!

Oklahoma Quakes

The image on the right shows a dramatic increase in the Oklahoma area. Both images show only 2.3 or larger quakes, the minimum magnitude in the data for 2006.

January 2006 January 2016

The increasing counts may be due to changing methods of detection; however, a new cluster of quakes is clearly present in Oklahoma (central U.S.A.)

Data 2001--2016

Number of quakes 2.3 or greater in the Oklahoma region.

plot of chunk unnamed-chunk-2

   year  cnt
1  2001    0
2  2002    4
3  2003    2
4  2004    5
5  2005    2
6  2006    8
7  2007    5
8  2008   10
9  2009   39
10 2010  159
11 2011  154
12 2012   83
13 2013  261
14 2014 1911
15 2015 2660

Shiny Web App

Using the web app at https://gdeyoung.shinyapps.io/project/

  • You can explore years 2001 to 2015 and view plots of the locations of quakes.
  • You can change the magnitude of the quakes that are displayed.
  • You can see distributions of the quake magnitude or time intervals between quakes.