3D Printed Earthquake Data Visualisation

There have been many areas of application for prosumer 3D printing that just wouldn’t have occurred to me, with fascinating stories of just how broad the utility of desktop 3D printing can be. The visualisation of non-visual data is one of those. Sound, usually in the form of music, sometimes in the form of voice data such as the popular waveform necklace and bracelet by bza.biz, is really interesting to see in 3D printed form. Those printed iterations are generally for artistic and leisure purposes. Doug McCune, however, has created a data visualisation that may point towards life-saving functions for 3D data viz, when he recently extruded the data from an earthquake.

During the night of the twenty fourth of August this year an earthquake struck Napa, near San Francisco, California. Doug McCune was woken by the quake and found that initially he could wake people and warn them, but Doug wanted to do more. As news came through that there was considerable damage in the Napa area, with the earthquake measuring magnitude 6.0 ― the largest to hit the San Francisco bay area since 1989 ― Doug began downloading seismic data from the U.S. Geological Survey to gain an understanding of the experience in Napa to produce a 3D printed visual representation of the Peak Ground Velocity (PVG) information.

First, Doug converted the source GIS data to a three dimensional model by writing his own software, called shp2stl, which he has kindly made available for everyone to use. The software creates a directly proportional representation in the Z-axis, with a spot twice as high showing a PVG twice as great.

With a complex but accurate representation of the earthquake now in three dimensional digital format Doug went on to print the data. The final 3D print was produced in a series of nine panels representing the whole PVG information with considerable accuracy and detail.

For those with experience and expertise in geographic data, who knows just what societal and humanitarian benefits may be found in this technique. As the breadth of applications of prosumer 3D printing continues to grow, there is often a common thread of innovative uses of printing technology inspiring further ideas, which ultimately produce life changing and even life saving functions?