Recommendation – March 5, 2012
Posted by EQF on March 05, 2012 at 07:20:20:

The EPmap programs available at the following address are mainly intended for Earthquake Precursor Display work:


http://www.freewebs.com/eq-forecasting/Precursor-Data.html

However, I would recommend that even people who are not interested in that subject matter but who are interested in geology and earthquake and volcano related projects might find the program to be useful.

It can display basic and detailed world maps, a tectonic plates map, global volcanos, and earthquakes that can be selected by magnitude and date ranges.

I don’t know of any other freeware or even purchasable computer programs that can do all of those things.

The present tectonic plates map is fairly basic. But before too long we will probably go looking around for a highly detailed one that also shows fault zones. This is because we are planning to build an area expansion routine into the program. And it would then be able to show more and more tectonic plate and fault zone details when the chart is expanded.

The earthquakes in the default file are 80 column width NEIC search 5 and higher magnitude earthquakes going back to the start of 1990. That file is easy to update. And lower magnitude earthquakes can also be easily added if desired. We won’t be doing that ourselves because it would take the program too long to search through a list going down to 4 magnitude for example. But if someone is interested in low magnitude earthquakes for a specific area they can simply be added to the list and the program search feature will find them regardless of if they are at the top or bottom of the list.

The next program update should be ready for downloads in a day or two.

So far I have not had time to circulate information regarding the availability of the program outside of this bulletin board. But I will likely be doing that within a few days. One thing I want to avoid is having too many people doing work that needs supervision. I am presently having a difficult time just developing projects for Roger to work on. And with the latest program update he should be able to develop code even faster!