For Form 2 who have just started to study earthquakes in class (and for anyone else who might be interested).......Click on the banner above to link to the Edinburgh Earth Observatory website. This is an excellent source of information about recent, past and yet-to-happen earthquakes! The home page screen offers a quick tour of the site and I'd suggest that you go from there to 'Quake animation' and 'Quake mapping'. Quake animation will produce an animation of all earthquakes over the last month. In just one minute it builds up a week by week map (centred on the Atlantic or Pacific - you choose!) of global earthquakes and produces a final map like this...
It is not difficult to see why people living at plate boundaries have more to fear from earthquakes than those of us who live in the middle of a plate.
You could then move on to the 'quake mapping' page where there is an excellent interactive map. As well as earthquake data, you can plot a whole series of physical and human features like types of plate boundary and population density on the map. Remember to 'refresh map' after each addition. You can also zoom in to see areas of the word in more detail.
A similar map, produced by the US Geological Society can be viewed here.
