The stunning beauty of Maps, part III

History and current events are a great opportunity for GIS as they allow to disseminate pertinent information fast to those who need it. They bring out the best in map-making I posted here and here already. Not a few websites posted maps on the Japanese catastrophe, here are those I found from watching Al-Jazeera and my favourite blogs.
NOAA tsunami map (I already posted it for Chilean quake exactly a year ago):

click on image to go to map

The arresting swatch of colour truly makes us grasp the magnitude of forces unleashed by tsunamis that appear to traverse such considerable distances.

English Aljazeera.net posting of ESRI's disaster map:

click on image to go to map

See how the bathymetry of the deep-sea trench offshore Japan takes a bend, just about where the many aftershocks happened, heralding greater stresses in the earth's crust.

MapLarge map linked from The Mapping Room blog:

click on image to go to map

This show the earhtquakes over time leading up to the event, in a sparse yet colourful spatio-temporal display I looked for in my previous blog posting.

Breaking news: NHK World announced the Japanese Met Office upgraded the magnitude of the original event to 9.0 on the Richter scale: a 0.1 increase on a log10 scale is 2.5 times greater destructive force than originally measured!

Update 17 March: for social maps, here is a Trends map from ESRI's Disaster Response:

click on image to go to map

Update 19 March: BBC News posted ESRI's disaster map above on their IT news show Click.