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Classroom exercise: the biggest earthquake in the UK this century¶

The Problem¶

GeoJSON is a JSON-based file format for sharing geographic data. One example dataset is the USGS earthquake data:

In [1]:

import requests
quakes = requests.get("http://earthquake.usgs.gov/fdsnws/event/1/query.geojson",
                      params={
                          'starttime': "2000-01-01",
                          "maxlatitude": "58.723",
                          "minlatitude": "50.008",
                          "maxlongitude": "1.67",
                          "minlongitude": "-9.756",
                          "minmagnitude": "1",
                          "endtime": "2018-10-11",
                          "orderby": "time-asc"}
                      )

In [2]:

quakes.text[0:100]

Out[2]:

'{"type":"FeatureCollection","metadata":{"generated":1700730718000,"url":"https://earthquake.usgs.gov'

Your exercise: determine the location of the largest magnitude earthquake in the UK this century.

You'll need to:

Get the text of the web result
Parse the data as JSON
Understand how the data is structured into dictionaries and lists
- Where is the magnitude?
- Where is the place description or coordinates?
Program a search through all the quakes to find the biggest quake
Find the place of the biggest quake
Form a URL for an online map service at that latitude and longitude: look back at the introductory example
Display that image