Why quakes?
Ever since I lived in the San Francisco Bay area, I've found earthquakes fascinating. I experienced one earthquake while living there (4.9 on the Richter scale), and late at night on The Weather Channel I used to watch the earthquake reports.
I always thought of earthquakes as "large destructive events", but watching The Weather Channel taught me that most earthquakes are small and imperceptible. I became interested in learning more about where earthquakes happened most often, what foreshocks and aftershocks appeared around major earthquakes, and so on.
I also use earthquake data in Intro CS when I cover data visualization, because the data is fairly easy to understand and process, there are few "holes", and the data lends itself well to mapping on existing world maps. This also gives students practice converting longitude and latitude to x-y coordinates.
