A Voxel-based Approach to Earthquake Simulation

Earthquakes are a major issue in Italy with an average of 2000 earthquakes per year. The “Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia” (INGV) provides a huge dataset containing all the information about earthquakes occurred in Italy since 1985. The problem with the provided data is that they are static and disaggregate, and the INGV service does not provide any dynamic visualization.

We propose as a solution Visual Earthquakes, a Web Application which provides an interactive and dynamic way of visualizing earthquakes in a 3D environment modeled with voxels. It offers the visualization of hypocenters and also shows the arrival order of the seismic waves to the seismographic stations and their propagation.

We illustrate with some use cases how the visualization of hypocenters works and how the user can visualize the propagation of earthquakes through the terrain.