Datum seismica

what is it

The first kind of living creature. It is not fed a fixed file but a live feed of global earthquakes, magnitude 4.5 and up. Every time the file is opened it fetches the quakes recorded since it last grew, and grows on. No maker chooses its death: it lives as long as the crust keeps trembling and the feed keeps reporting.

how is it made

Each day is one growth step. The bearing of the heaviest quake, where on the globe it struck relative to the one before, steers the angle: a genuinely measured direction. The number of quakes that day drives step length, the strongest magnitude drives thickness, depth sets the colour. A quake of magnitude 6.0 or more is a shock.

what to look for

• Alive. no fixed death date. The status reads alive while the feed is fresh, and only flips to dead if the quakes stop arriving for more than three times the usual gap.
• A measured compass. direction is the real azimuth of the heaviest quake, one of the genuinely measured headings in the project.

the honest part

Conceptually it carries the second form of death: the maker does not choose the end, the silence of the source does. The honest catch is the stem: the history baked into the file before the live feed takes over is synthetic, structurally faithful but invented, because the build environment had no open internet. Online, the live layer grows it on real USGS data from the stem boundary forward.