Oklahoma - where the earth quakes, fracking down the plains

I made this visualization using data from The USGS after reading an article in The Guardian about how it's likely that the spike in earthquakes in Oklahoma and nearby states are man-made and caused by the fracking process of injecting wastewater into deep-underground disposal wells.

I was inspired to make a map which could show the epicentre and magnitude of earthquakes over a period of time, and found a great example of this with a CartoDB Torque map.

I really like this visualization because I think it gives a good historical context of earthquakes in this area going back to 1975, and then shows the explosion that begins in 2009. The map may proceed through time a bit quickly, which is a fairly simple element to change using CartoDB's interface. I think an accompanying static bar chart with the number and magnitudes of earthquakes over time in Oklahoma and the surrounding states would help supplement the dynamic nature of the map.


On a side note, I also found the following chart made by Steve Maier using Plotly which tells another very important stories about the history of earthquakes in Oklahoma.