Wednesday Search Challenge (8/6/14): Earthquake data?

The San Andreas Fault is the diagonal line running from Bodega Bay (upper left), through
Tomales Bay (in the middle) and down to Bolinas (lower right).
And then it continues on down to pass just a few miles west
of my house in Palo Alto.

THERE'S been a lot of discussion recently about the (apparently) growing number of earthquakes in Oklahoma. There's suspicion about deep waste wells, or maybe it's the fracking, or maybe it's just that time of year.

In California, you'll often hear people talking about "earthquake weather." I don't think it's a real thing, but just something people say. The last big earthquake I lived through was in October of 1989. It was classic "earthquake weather," hot and dry.

Since there's this really big fault zone near my house, I consider these kinds of questions from time to time.

So this got me to thinking about earthquakes and whether or not there actually IS any kind of seasonality to them. And, by the way, is Oklahoma (or any particular region) actually having more earthquakes now than just a few years ago? So this is today's Search Challenge...

1. Can you find data about when and where earthquakes happen and then chart it so we can see location and number over time? Ideally, you would create (or find) a chart showing number of earthquakes by US state over the past 10 years. Even better, if that chart could show month-by-month, then we should be able to spot both any seasonality effects AND resolve the question about Oklahoma.

Note that I have not yet created this chart, so I don't know how easy it will be. (But I'll start working on it today.)

NEWS FLASH: Regular readers of SearchResearch probably recall the Challenge we had in April about Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and the Rosetta Lander. You might be interested to know the satellite just went into near-comet orbit successfully. (See the New York Times article on the rendezvous, which includes some fantastic video of the comet.) The Philae probe will be launched sometime in November. Stay tuned!