Electronic Supplement Examples
Color Figures
The following figures demonstrate that color is helpful in communicating subtle aspects in graphical representations, even when both are viewed on the computer screen. However, while both the greyscale and color versions have approximately the same filesize, and are equivalent to produce electronically, it is substantially more difficult to reproduce color art in print. That's why color plate pages cost so much more.
What we want you to imagine is the halftone (grayscale) images appearing in the print journal, so that the figure can be cogently discussed in print, while color versions are available in the online edition.
Don't think crazy about this, however--not every graphic needs to be in color to convey intellectual content. But these images are relatively complex multidimensional depictions, and the structural information is conveyed more readily to the reader when they are rendered in color. Specifically, Figure 1 doesn't really gain much by color, Figure 2 is improved somewhat, but Figure 3 becomes significantly more clear by having the magnitude of the aftershocks color-coded, in addition to the radius of the cubes.
Figure 1. 3D perspective of an isosurface for an S-wave velocity of 2.6 km/s in the Los Angeles Basin.
Figure 2. 3D perspective of a rupture simulation of the 1992 Landers, California, earthquake.
Figure 3. Visualization of main shock and aftershocks from the 1994 Northridge, California, earthquake.
Animations
The following examples are movies. The first was created as a frame-by-frame animation from numerical simulations. The second is a synthesis of frames showing different views. They are stored as MPEG files, so you must have a helper application or a browser plug-in that can play this sort of file. Among the many software packages which can play MPEG movies are recent versions of Apple's QuickTime, Microsoft's Windows Media Player and the open source projects MPlayer and VideoLAN Client (VLC). For general information on the MPEG standard see the MPEG FAQ at the Berkeley Multimedia Reasearch Center.
Movie 1. The 3D mountain topography of the Upper Borrego Valley. The highest elevation in the area is roughly 1,000 m above sea level. The animation here simulates a fly-by of this region and gives the reader a better sense of the perspective than a static rendering, or even than a series of images. A more flexible way of visualizing the valley here is the data cube in a format that would load into a 3D manipulation tool, such as a VRML viewer or a molecular kinemage program.
Page 2 of our Electronic Supplement Examples contains several more animations, created by K. B. Olsen (kbolsen@crustal.ucsb.edu) as a supplement to an article in BSSA 90:6B. The abstract for the article can be viewed online.
Stay tuned for more cool updates.