It's been a while since a major earthquake has overtaken the headlines, but as this animation shows (source data here), major earthquakes aren't actually all that rare: it's just (relatively) rare that they occur in heavily populated areas.
It's a really nice information design: the size of the circle represents the magnitude of each earthquake, and the color represents its depth. The way the circles appear and then slowly shrink away is a great way of visualizing the geographic impact of these inherently short-lived incidents. I also like the way it's represented on an actual globe, even though half of the data is obscured at any one time, as it gives a better sense of the geographic relationships. Nonetheless, NOAA also produced a whole-earth projection version of the same animation:
That's all from us for this week. We'll be back on Monday, reporting from the useR! conference in Brussels. Have a great weekend!