http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/11/science/earthquakes-volcanos.html 2016-10-10 17:29:59 What 50 Years of Earthquakes and Volcanic Eruptions Look Like A new interactive app illustrates the connection between the natural disasters and Earth’s hot interior. === Earth We feel it whenever the ground quakes and volcanoes erupt. These devastating events, which kill thousands of people and affect millions more every year, may seem like random acts of nature. But when you watch them over a long time scale, a pattern emerges. A new “Our planet has an internal heat engine; it’s like a warm-blooded animal,” said By looking at the interactive, you can see that earthquakes and eruptions are concentrated along plate boundaries, the locations where Earth is creating or destroying crust. It also provides details on the destructive power of specific events, like the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption or the The information for the app comes from the Global Volcanism Program’s data on eruptions and the United States Geological Survey’s database of earthquakes. Because the researchers had only what they thought were complete catalogs starting in 1960, the app does not cover earlier geological disasters. The map also features large green blobs that represent sulfur dioxide emissions spewed from volcanoes. The data for the gases was collected using NASA satellites and covers large emissions since 1978. When you click on a sulfur dioxide release label, you can see how far the chemicals travel through the atmosphere, like the catastrophic 2008 Kasatochi eruption in the Aleutian Islands in Alaska, which ejected ash more than 50,000 feet into the air. “You can be in a city like New York and watch a volcano erupt in Alaska and see that the gases passed over your city,” Dr. Cottrell said. She added that by visualizing the earthquakes, eruptions and emissions over the past 50 years, the interactive app “allows people to feel the heartbeat of the planet they live on.”