We are excited to introduce a new toolbox for the seismology and wider Earth Science community, designed to provide streamlined access to the International Seismological Centre (ISC) database within the MATLAB environment. The ISC Earthquake Toolbox for MATLAB also provides a set of tools and example for working with the earthquake catalogue and parametric data curated and provided by the International Seismological Centre (ISC).

The International Seismological Centre (ISC), based in the UK, combines data from over 100 earthquake monitoring agencies across more than 40 countries. The ISC Bulletin, hosted by ISC, is the most comprehensive global catalogue of earthquake data, primarily serving researchers and instructors in geophysics and seismology. It encompasses detailed records of earthquake epicentral locations and depths, phase arrival times, amplitudes, and earthquakes magnitudes from various sources worldwide.

Figure: A summary map of earthquakes larger than magnitude 4.0 detected in the Alaskan / Aleutian subduction zone from the years 2000 – 2020, plotted in the ISC Earthquake Toolbox for MATLAB.

The ISC Earthquake Toolbox for MATLAB allows interactive access to the ISC Bulletin through the MATLAB environment. Once pulled into MATLAB, the data is stored in a MATLAB table, allowing ISC earthquake locations to be easily used, compared and visualized in the MATLAB workspace. The toolbox streamlines earthquake catalogue analysis, enabling quick generation of regional seismicity summaries, comparison of earthquake magnitudes calculated by different methods and evaluation of earthquake locations reported by different agencies. The toolbox is equipped with functions designed to plot the magnitude-time distribution of historical seismic events and to simplify the computation of critical earthquake statistics, such as b-values. With the usage of the Mapping Toolbox, users can create a summary of regional seismicity and the resulting earthquake data set can then be further explored in the MATLAB environment.

The toolbox is hosted on GitHub (github.com/tomgarth/ISC_Earthquake_Toolbox)where you can find a live code example (Introduction_ISCToolboxForMATLAB.mlx) that demonstrates how to use the Earthquake toolbox to plot and compare earthquake locations, as well as compare different magnitude types, and calculate b-values and magnitude of completeness for the selected datasets.

Introductory Live Script

This live script is intended as a stepping off point to show the broad functionality of the ISC Earthquake Toolbox for MATLAB. The earthquake location and magnitude data can then be explored in further Live Scripts available with the GitHub distribution, and the tools will hopefully provide the basis for your own research projects or teaching practicals.

To run this example in MATLAB Online, click “Open in MATLAB Online” in the README.md.

Above:Launching the introductory LiveScipt from the MathWorks File Exchange (Link provided above).

Interactive Download Within MATLAB

This GUI (Graphical User Interface) hosted within a MATLAB Live Script allows you to build a catalogue for your own purposes, and save the catalogue as a .mat file, that can then be easily used within the MATLAB environment generally, and by the ISC Earthquake Toolbox for MATLAB specifically.

Above Left: Designing a data download via the ISC bulletin search within MATLAB. Above Right: Selecting a given area of interest by manually designing a polygon.

Exploring and Plotting Earthquake Locations

Example Live Scripts distributed with the ISC Earthquake toolbox for MATLAB show how to integrate the earthquake location data from the ISC Bulletin with the Mapping and 3D plotting tools within MATLAB.

Top Left: Summary map produced by the Earthquake Toolbox For MATLAB of seismicity in Northern Japan for 2018 - 2021. Top Right: Depth profile taken North South. Bottom Left: Depth profile taken East West.

Above: 3D plot of subduction zone seismicity beneath Northern Japan.