By Maggie Call and Avery Schaff Magnetic Field Pulses By Maggie Call and Avery Schaff

Can size of magnetic pulses predict magnitude of earthquakes? Question: Can size of magnetic pulses predict magnitude of earthquakes?

Hypothesis We thought that the bigger the pulse size in the magnetic field, the bigger the earthquakes.

Background We picked this questions because earthquakes are happening all the time and that makes this project very recent. Many website we found questioned whether the magnetic field had anything to do with earthquakes or not. That is what we tried to figure out.

Webpages https://geomag.usgs.gov/plots/dst.php/ https://earthquake.usgs.gov/

table This table shows the relationship between the magnitude of the earthquake and the size of the pulse at the same time. If you look closely you can see that earthquakes of the same magnitude have different measurements for pulse size. We did measure all the earthquakes in the same place (Hawaii). This shows that we were wrong about the magnetic field predicting earthquakes.

Graph This graph puts our data all over the place. There is no correlation between the points and the r- squared value is very low. This further shows that the two data sequences have nothing to do with each other 

Conclusion Our conclusion was that the magnetic pulses in the Earth do not predict earthquakes. The pieces of information had no correlation on our  graph. Our scatter chart was all over the place and the R squared value was very low which means that our information didn’t really have anything to do with each other.