earthquake Recent Earthquakes (Live USGS Feed) star

How It Works

This tool fetches its list directly from the US Geological Survey's (USGS) public, continuously updated global earthquake feed — the same authoritative dataset that professional seismologists, news agencies and emergency-response agencies rely on worldwide. Your browser requests the feed itself; nothing is cached, stored or relayed through this site's server, so the list you see is exactly what USGS is reporting at that moment. Each entry shows the magnitude (color-coded by severity band), the named location, the depth below the surface, and how long ago the event was detected. Enable location sharing and the entire list re-sorts by distance from you — computed locally in your browser, never uploaded anywhere — turning "was that an earthquake?" into an answer backed by data rather than a guess.

Magnitude itself is a logarithmic scale, which trips up a lot of people reading these lists for the first time. Going from magnitude 5.0 to 6.0 is not "20% more energy" — it is roughly 32 times more seismic energy released. Climb two full points, say from 4.0 to 6.0, and the energy jump is roughly 1,000-fold. That is the mathematical reason a magnitude 7.5 earthquake can level buildings that a 5.5 barely cracks: the numbers look close, the physical forces involved are not.

Example: imagine two earthquakes 30 minutes apart — one magnitude 4.2 near a rural area, one magnitude 6.3 near a city. They list back-to-back with similar-looking rows, same layout, same color scale, but the 6.3 released on the order of a thousand times more energy than the 4.2. Reading the raw number without the logarithmic context massively understates the real difference between them.

What You Should Know

• Magnitude is not intensity. Magnitude measures the energy released at the earthquake's source — one fixed number describing the whole event, wherever you are. Intensity, often reported separately on the Modified Mercalli scale, measures how strongly the shaking was actually felt at a specific place, and it varies by location: distance from the epicenter, depth of the rupture, and local soil or ground conditions all change it. The same earthquake can register as severe shaking in one town and be barely noticeable thirty kilometers away — magnitude alone can't tell you that, only intensity maps can.
• First reports are estimates, not final values. The magnitude shown minutes after an event comes from the handful of stations that detected it first. Over the following hours, as more stations around the globe report in, USGS refines the number — a shift of a few tenths of a point (say 5.4 becoming 5.6) is routine scientific correction, not a mistake in this tool or in USGS's original report.
• Depth changes what you feel on the surface. A shallow magnitude 5.0, occurring just a few kilometers underground, can shake the surface harder than a deep magnitude 6.0 occurring 300 km down, because a deep rupture's energy dissipates over a much longer path before reaching you.
• Your location never leaves your device. Distance sorting is pure client-side math — your coordinates are never transmitted to this site or to USGS; the underlying feed is identical for every visitor regardless of where they are.