Earthquakes today: every USGS event of the past hour, day or week
Here is where.
Every event the United States Geological Survey has posted in the past hour, day or week — newest first on the wire, each with its magnitude, where it was, how deep, and how long ago. The feed is the survey’s own public GeoJSON summary, the same one its own site runs on, and this page asks for it again every five minutes for as long as it stays open.
The survey asks for no key, and nothing sits between it and your browser. A magnitude here is whatever USGS says it is — often automatic at first, revised when an analyst reviews it — and a row is one click from the survey’s own event page, which is the authority on every number this desk shows.
three windows — hour, day, week · USGS’s own magnitudes · a fresh read every five minutes · map and meters drawn on the page
The wire
Newest first. All of it.
Pick a window and the wire fills with what USGS has posted in it — the magnitude on a bullet inked by band, the place in the survey’s own words, the depth, and how long ago. The list refreshes itself while you watch, says when it last read the feed, and a press of the button reads it again on the spot.
The wire
waiting for the feed
Not read yet.
An empty push reaches this device when USGS posts an event at or above the magnitude you pick, or raises one past it. The notification carries no figure — the tap opens this desk, which reads the wire live. The sender is a cron on this host; the line below says when it last ran.
Asking the alert door…
The map
Rings on a drawn coastline.
The whole window at once — one ring per event, placed by the feed’s own coordinates, sized by magnitude, inked by band, and pulsing while the event is under an hour old. Under the rings is a world coastline from Natural Earth’s public-domain 1:110m set, drawn straight onto a canvas without map tiles or a mapping library. Click a ring and the desk names it below, with the survey’s own page one click away.
The map
Click a ring to name the event under it.
The meters
The window, in three tallies.
Three tallies of the same read: the largest event in the window, the number in each magnitude band, and the spread of depths from shallow to deep as a single bar split in proportion to the counts. The meters make no request of their own; they count what the wire already holds.
The meters
Biggest of the window
—
By magnitude band
Depth — km below the surface, widths proportional to the count
Overview
Every earthquake the survey has posted, in three windows.
Quake reads the United States Geological Survey’s three public summary files — all events of the past hour, of the past day and of the past week, at every magnitude — straight from earthquake.usgs.gov into your browser, and reads the chosen window again every five minutes. The newest-first list, the map and the meters are three views of that single download, so they cannot disagree about what happened.
The list stops at the newest hundred events; the map and the meters count every one in the window. Magnitudes fall into four bands — under 2.5, 2.5 to 4.5, 4.5 to 6, and 6 or more — and depths into five, 0–10, 10–35, 35–70, 70–300 and beyond 300 kilometres, cut finer inside the survey’s own shallow class (under 70 km) because that is where most of the catalogue lies. A device that allows notifications can ask to hear about events at M2.5, 4.5, 5.5, 6.0 or 7.0 and above; the notification carries no figure, and tapping it opens the live list.
This is a reading of the catalogue, not an early-warning system. Volcanic unrest has its own desk, Volcano; active fires are on Wildfire, tropical storms on Hurricane, and the ground, air and rivers side by side on Conditions.
About
A desk, not a seismometer.
The data is the USGS earthquake summary feed — the GeoJSON files the survey publishes at earthquake.usgs.gov, without a key, refreshed on its side about every minute. This page reads the all-events file for the window you choose, so what you see is what the survey had posted moments ago: earthquakes mostly, and the occasional quarry blast or ice quake the survey logs alongside them, each shown under the event type the survey gives it.
The magnitudes are USGS’s own and they move. A fresh event usually arrives with an automatic solution; analysts revise magnitude, depth and place as better data comes in, sometimes hours later, and this desk simply shows the latest posted value. The survey’s coverage is also honest about itself: it sees small events far better inside the United States than outside it, so the wire is not a census of the world’s seismicity — it is a census of the survey’s catalogue.
Each row says how long ago its event was, counted against your own clock from the survey’s UTC timestamp; hovering a row gives the full local time. The coastline is background, simplified from Natural Earth and shipped with the page, and it places nothing: every ring sits on the survey’s own coordinates. The window you choose is kept in this browser only, and a figure the feed leaves out stays out.