Earthquake History

Preparing the seismic record…

1900–2026

Play the record year by year.

Tiles © Esri

Loading The Seismic Record

Unpacking 416,841 recorded events…

Filtered Record Event Details
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Seismic Guide

How To Read The Earthquake Record

This tool lives at quakes.jbf.com.

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.

WhereThe Faults Draw Themselves

California, Alaska, the Cascadia coast, Yellowstone — the plate boundaries appear with no basemap needed.

SizeHow Strong?

Mark area grows steeply with magnitude, so a great quake reads as the event it was.

DepthHow Far Down?

Colour by depth and the deep slabs under Alaska and the Pacific coast light up.

Reading The Record

More Dots Does Not Mean More Earthquakes

  • The record grows because seismometers did. A magnitude 3 in 1930 Nevada usually went unrecorded; today the network hears nearly everything above 2.5 in the lower 48.
  • The great quakes are the exception — M6.5 and up were felt and recorded for the whole century, so their history is trustworthy end to end.
  • Some clusters are human: parts of Oklahoma and Texas light up after 2009, tracking wastewater injection from oil and gas operations.
  • The catalog covers a North-American download region, so edges of Mexico, Canada and the Caribbean appear too.

Buried In The Catalog

The Bombs Are In Here Too

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.

About The Data
Events
Pending
Earthquakes
Pending
Nuclear Tests
Pending
Great Quakes, M6.5+
Pending

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.

Official References USGS: Search The Earthquake Catalog USGS: Magnitude, Energy And Shaking
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