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.
Why USGS and not EMSC or EarthScope?
USGS is not the only public seismic catalogue, and it is worth knowing what the alternatives are good at.
The EMSC — the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre — is the regional authority for Europe and the Mediterranean, and it is often quicker than anyone else for events in that region. Its real distinguishing feature is crowdsourced felt reports: people near a quake submit what they experienced, which builds a picture of shaking long before instrumental analysis is finalised. If you are specifically watching European seismicity, EMSC is the better first stop.
EarthScope's Interactive Earthquake Browser (formerly hosted by IRIS, which merged into EarthScope) is a different kind of tool altogether. It is built for exploring the historical catalogue — decades of events, filtered and plotted along cross-sections to reveal subduction geometry. It answers "what has this region done over time", not "what just happened".
We use USGS because this tracker answers a third question: what has happened globally in the last hours or days, wherever you are. One worldwide catalogue, no API key, correct CORS headers, and a stable feed format — which is what lets the whole thing run in your browser with no server of ours involved. For a European event you may well see EMSC report it first; for the geological long view, EarthScope is richer. They are complements, not rivals.
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.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. USGS runs two products that genuinely go further than any catalogue feed can. ShakeMap models the actual ground shaking across a region after an event, which is what determines damage — a moderate shallow quake under a city shakes far harder than a large deep one out at sea. ShakeAlert is the real early-warning system for the US West Coast: it detects the fast P-wave and issues an alert seconds before the damaging S-wave arrives. Seconds is not much, but it is enough to stop a train or drop under a desk. Neither is something a static browser page can replicate, and we do not pretend otherwise — if you are in a seismic zone, ShakeAlert-powered alerts on your phone are the thing that matters, not this map.
See the USGS feed come to life on the map.
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