About This Project

A free, open visualization of the global earthquake record

What this is

Earthquakes on the Map is an interactive world map of every earthquake of magnitude 4.5 or greater recorded since 1900 — more than 300,000 events. A year slider lets you move through the record and watch the pattern build up: within a few decades the earthquakes trace out the boundaries of Earth’s tectonic plates.

It is a companion to The Pangea Map, which does the same thing for 540 million years of continental drift. Both are non-commercial and free to use.

The data

Every earthquake comes from the USGS Earthquake Catalog (ComCat), retrieved through the FDSN Event Web Service. The catalogue is compiled by the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Earthquake Information Center from seismic networks worldwide and is in the public domain. Earthquake data courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey.

The data is downloaded in bulk, thinned to a compact form (time, latitude, longitude, depth, magnitude and place name for each event), split into per-decade files, and served as static JSON. It is a periodic snapshot, not a live feed — the date of the current snapshot is shown in the site footer.

Why the magnitude 4.5 cut-off

The map includes every event of magnitude 4.5 and above. Below that, the historical global catalogue is incomplete and strongly biased toward well-instrumented regions: California, Japan, Italy and a few others have dense networks that detect very small earthquakes, while much of the world does not. Plotting everything would make those regions look like the planet’s only seismic hotspots.

At magnitude 4.5 and above, the modern catalogue is close to globally complete, so the map shows a fair picture of where earthquakes actually happen. Even so, the years before roughly 1960 under-count real activity, because instrument coverage of the oceans and the Southern Hemisphere was thin.

How the site is built

The site is a static site built with Astro. The map is drawn with D3 using a Natural Earth projection; the land outline is from Natural Earth via the world-atlas dataset. There is no map tile server and no framework running in your browser beyond the small D3 bundle — the whole thing is plain HTML, CSS and a single script.

The site sets no advertising or tracking cookies. Traffic analytics use Umami, a cookieless, privacy-friendly tool self-hosted on our own subdomain. See the privacy page for details.

Corrections and contact

This site aims to reflect established, peer-reviewed science and official USGS figures. If you spot an error — a wrong magnitude, a mislabelled event, an out-of-date statistic — please get in touch at hello@earthquakesonmap.com and it will be corrected.

This project is not affiliated with the U.S. Geological Survey or any other government agency. It is not an emergency service. For earthquake safety and hazard information, consult your national geological survey or civil-protection authority.

Sources

  1. U.S. Geological Survey — Earthquake Catalog (ComCat) and FDSN Event Web Service, earthquake.usgs.gov/fdsnws/event/1/.
  2. U.S. Geological Survey — Earthquake Hazards Program educational pages.
  3. Natural Earth / world-atlas — public-domain vector land data.
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