The seismic desk · USGS, read live
The ground moved.
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, fetched by this page directly and read again every five minutes while you watch.
No key, no account, no server in the middle. 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 · read every 5 minutes · drawn by this page’s own hand
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.
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. The coastline is traced from Natural Earth’s public-domain 1:110m outline; no tiles, no library, just the canvas. 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, added up.
The same read, counted three ways: the biggest event of the window, how many landed in each magnitude band, and where the depths fell — shallow to deep, drawn as one strip whose widths are the counts. Nothing here is fetched separately; the meters and the wire are one read of one feed.
The meters
Biggest of the window
—
By magnitude band
Depth — km below the surface, widths proportional to the count
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, labelled here as exactly what the feed calls them.
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.
Times are shown as “how long ago” against your own clock, from the feed’s UTC millisecond stamps — hover a row for the full local time. The map’s coastline is traced from Natural Earth’s public-domain 1:110m outline, simplified and carried in the page; it is scenery, not authority. Your chosen window is remembered in this browser and nowhere else, and what the feed does not say, the desk does not invent.