Why We Use USGS Earthquake Data
Every earthquake on the tracker comes from one source: the United States Geological Survey (USGS). Here's why, and how the data actually reaches your screen.
One trusted, global feed
The USGS operates the Advanced National Seismic System and works with seismic networks worldwide, combining their readings into a single real-time catalogue of earthquakes everywhere on Earth — not just the United States. It's the same feed that powers countless official dashboards, news maps and research tools. Building on it means the tracker shows authoritative numbers rather than our own estimates.
Free, keyless and CORS-friendly
The USGS publishes its data as GeoJSON summary feeds that anyone can read directly from a browser — no API key, no sign-up, no rate-limit gymnastics. They also send the right cross-origin headers, so a static page like ours can fetch them straight from your browser. That fits the LK Forge way: a tool that just works the moment the page loads, with nothing to configure.
How an event reaches the map
The flow is short and entirely client-side:
- You pick a magnitude and time range — say "M2.5+, past day".
- Your browser requests the matching feed — for example
2.5_day.geojson— directly fromearthquake.usgs.gov. - Each earthquake arrives as a GeoJSON "feature" with its magnitude, place, time, depth and coordinates.
- The page plots each one as a coloured dot on a first-party world map and lists it, newest first.
There's no LK Forge server in the middle storing or relaying anything — the request goes from your browser to USGS and back.
What it is — and isn't
Because the data is post-event, the tracker reports earthquakes that have already happened, usually within minutes. It is deliberately not an early-warning or prediction system. For alerts, follow USGS and your local authorities. What we add is a clean, fast, privacy-respecting way to read that public data — with a magnitude scale, a world map and "near me" distances on top.
See the USGS feed come to life on the map.
Open the Earthquake Tracker