Earthquake data sources used by Quake Pulse

Primary source: USGS and contributing seismic networks

Quake Pulse primarily uses public earthquake observations distributed by the U.S. Geological Survey Earthquake Hazards Program. USGS products combine information from many contributing seismic networks around the world.

Recent data

For recent activity, Quake Pulse imports the USGS all-day, all-week and all-month GeoJSON feeds. These feeds provide event identifiers, magnitude, time, coordinates, depth, descriptive location and other available properties.

Historical data

The historical catalogue is extended through the USGS FDSN Event Web Service. Quake Pulse currently focuses its long-term import on M4.5+ events, which helps control volume and makes long-range comparisons more meaningful than a catalogue dominated by changing detection of very small earthquakes.

Quake Pulse derived data

Regional counts, daily statistics, magnitude distributions, visual rankings and multilingual pages are generated by Quake Pulse from the locally stored observations. These derived views are not official USGS products.

Geographic data

Quake Pulse now processes country boundaries locally to assign earthquake coordinates to countries without sending each point to a third-party reverse-geocoding API. Country names and localized slugs are stored in the project dataset. ISO 3166-2 subdivision names are used only when the USGS reference-place wording can be matched with sufficient confidence. Local pages combine recurring USGS reference descriptions with a city gazetteer based on GeoNames cities15000. Distance-to-earthquake calculations use the stored city coordinates and epicentre coordinates.

Country boundary geometry: packaged offline dataset derived from CountryInfo (MIT license) and Natural Earth (public domain). Subdivision names and codes: ISO 3166-2 via pycountry. City gazetteer: GeoNames cities15000 (CC BY 4.0). Seismic observations remain sourced from the USGS and contributing networks.

Earthquakes by country →