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From vedur.is

Map of earthquakes over the last 48 hours in Iceland.

More like this

I had to go to the link to find out that the color coding is according to elapsed time since the earthquake was recorded, rather than the magnitude of the quake.

I don't know enough Icelandic to understand the Y axis on the lower plot at that link. It doesn't look like Richter magnitude (3 is quite mild, and none of these earthquakes even rates a 3 on whatever scale they are using). What are they plotting there?

By Eric Lund (not verified) on 11 May 2012 #permalink

It's a badly drawn left turn arrow for alien space craft.

The clump of points on the south coast is Katla - not abnormal activity, though there was apparently a small glacial flood there last month or so.
The line is one of the main branches of the mid-Atlantic rift, there is another branch angling more south towards Katla.
The spread off the north coast is a rift zone.

Never seen the ridge light up like that.

Re Eric Lund @1

The y-axis is indeed magnitude, but using the more up-to-date Moment Magnitude scale rather than richter. See

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_magnitude_scale

I very much enjoyed the coverage at Erik Klemetti's blog of the eyjafjallajokull thingy a while back, and this site (well, the english version http://en.vedur.is/earthquakes-and-volcanism/earthquakes/) was were most of the data under discussion was from.