Preparing the seismic record…
Play the record year by year.
© OpenStreetMap contributors · © CARTO
Unpacking 416,841 recorded events…
Current map filters · strongest first
Every mark is one recorded event — 404,280 earthquakes of magnitude 2.5 and up since 1900, from the United States Geological Survey. The mark grows with magnitude, because the scale hides how violent the big ones are: each whole step releases about thirty-two times the energy of the one below.
California, Alaska, the Cascadia coast, Yellowstone — the plate boundaries appear with no basemap needed.
Mark area grows steeply with magnitude, so a great quake reads as the event it was.
Colour by depth and the deep slabs under Alaska and the Pacific coast light up.
Reading The Record
Buried In The Catalog
Seismometers cannot tell what made the ground move, only that it moved. So the catalog carries 673 nuclear test explosions, 1945 to 1992, most of them at the Nevada Test Site northwest of Las Vegas — plus thousands of quarry and mining blasts. They are not earthquakes, so this map keeps them out of the default view; switch them on and the Cold War draws itself as a tight knot in the desert.
Source: USGS earthquake catalog, magnitude 2.5 and up, 1900–2026, via the hazard-history archive. Depth shown in miles; a dash means depth was not recorded.