USA Today Mashup Provides Lesson in Plate Tectonics

USA Today published a mashup of earthquake locations that resulted in 1000+ deaths since 1900. But the additional geology lesson that the mashup reveals may have been missed by most readers. The mashup shows the location of plate boundaries and more importantly the movement along those plates. The red, blue and yellow lines designate ridges or rift ("divergent"), subduction ("convergent") and transverse ("transform") zones, respectively, along which the earth’s crust moves, grinds, and creates new crust. The mashup was provided as part of the newspaper’s coverage of the Haitian earthquake of January 12 and the data was supplied by the USGS. A map of the fault that produced the Haitian earthquake can be found on the USGS website.