I'm new to MapPoint 2004 and am mapping thousands of man-made earthquakes connected to geothermal options in a relatively small area at The Geysers of California.

Due to the tremendous number of earthquakes occurring over a relatively small geographic area, maps I produce become solid with earthquakes but only the top few hundred are visible (the remaining 99,000 are buried underneath).

I'm wondering if there's a way to have mapped data appear 3-dimensional against the 2-dimensional map (as this would better demonstrate the sheer number of earthquakes occuring over a small geographic area.

I'd be most appreciate of any ideas for accomplish this 3-D mapping within MapPoint 2004 (or via export to another program like MS Excel).

Many thanks!
Jeff

I know I've done various demo plots of earthquakes in MapPoint on this website and my own, but in this case I think you're pushing the limits of MapPoint. The redraw is probably pretty slow as well, isn't it?

What you could do is to colour code the earthquakes according to their depths.

Another option might be to "bin" the data into small square areas, and store #number of earthquakes for each 'bin'. Then you could use my GridImp application to plot these. You would then have a coloured map with different colours representing different nos. of earthquakes in that area.

http://www.mapping-tools.com/gridimp/index.shtml for details.

Most of my examples actually use earthquake hazard data

Slightly off topic, what is the state of research in the Geysers? When I was with the USGS about 10 years ago, they were starting to do tomographic studies of the area. They were also mapping Vp/Vs ratios, and also correlating the earthquake swarms with fluid injection.


Richard