Earthquake Magnitude vs. Latitude in Fiji

• Earthquakes are deadly and cause extensive damage to populated areas
• Predicting where high-magnitude earthquakes occur is valuable to preparing rescue efforts
• I asked: can the latitude of an earthquake effectively predict its magnitude?

• “Quakes” dataset of earthquakes in Fiji since 1964.

data(quakes) # Dataset is provided in base R.
head(quakes, 3) # Show the first three rows of the dataset.

     lat   long depth mag stations
1 -20.42 181.62   562 4.8       41
2 -20.62 181.03   650 4.2       15
3 -26.00 184.10    42 5.4       43

• “depth” = below-ground depth in km, “mag” = magnitude (>5 = moderate, >6 = severe), “stations” = number of stations reporting quake

• Shows scatterplots and regression lines of “mag” vs. “lat”
• Can choose to subset scatterplots based upon “stations”
  • Rationale: more weather stations reporting a given quake is less common, but a more robust measure of a quake

• “mag” vs. “lat” across all earthquakes in “quakes”
• No link –> severe quakes could happen anywhere