I created an app to monitor seismic activity during my niece’s summit of Mt. Rainer. Why?
My 18-year-old niece, Stella, decided she wanted to climb Mount Rainier (14,411 ft) to challenge herself, to honor her dad’s legacy (read more about that here), and to raise money for her nonprofit charity, AngelBear. She summited Mount Rainier on July 12, 2025, at 5am PT (see first photo here)
The week before her ascent, my sister called to tell me about the climb and her concern that there were reports of increased seismic activity at Mount Rainier, which the USGS classifies as an active volcano. I looked at the USGS Recent Earthquake Maps website, which, by default, displays earthquakes with a magnitude of 2.5 or greater, and reassured her that I didn’t see any significant activity being reported in Washington State.
After we hung up, I began to wonder: was my answer to my sister accurate? The earthquake maps from the USGS only show the “big stuff” that we all think of as earthquakes. But if you were trying to figure out if a major active volcano was about to blow, one of the things you’d look for is patterns of low-level seismic activity swarming at the location in question. The only problem is that for a non-data scientist like myself who doesn’t have access to advanced GIS mapping tools, I couldn’t find an easy way to answer my question.
I decided to try out a new class of no-code app-building tools to see if it would be possible to display data accurately to answer my sister’s question. The result is Josh's Seismic Data App, pictured to the left. It downloads all seismic events from the past 30 days and then displays a map view that allows the user to search by placenames, and it places a radius around the selected location that can be adjusted. All seismic events from the past 30 days will be displayed on the map and also on the two charts below. The Seismic Activity chart displays a histogram of each seismic event, with the date on the X-axis and the Magnitude of the event on the Y-axis. The Daily Seismic Event Count aggregates all events by day over the selected time period.
The goal is to not only show where the seismic events took place, but also when and with what frequency/intensity. By combining these views, the user (in this case, me) can examine the data and start to identify some outliers/meaning.
If we examine the Daily Seismic Event Count box, we can begin to see a pattern that tells an interesting story. My niece was scheduled to begin her ascent on July 10, which was two days after a rather startling spike in seismic activity on July 8. The trend after that activity was a fairly steep decrease in activity. If you base your analysis just on the daily number of events, it could be alarming.
However, if you examine the second chart in terms of the magnitude (i.e., intensity) of each event, you can see that none of the events were significantly above 2.0 on the Richter scale, and most were well below 1.
So, yes, there was an increase in the volume of events; however, the severity of those events was quite limited, and given that it took me a bit to put this all together and Stella was already up on the mountain by the time I finished, it didn’t seem like it was information that warranted urgent action.
But guess what? The web app is now live and available for you to try out: https://seismicdata.knauernever.com It’s an example of a bespoke app written for a single purpose and deployed relatively quickly at low/no cost. I’m starting to build these types of apps for others, so let reach out and let me know if that’s of interest!
