Earthquakes by Country
176,611 earthquakes have been located worldwide in our catalogue, and 174,804 of them fall inside the borders of one of the 138 countries and territories listed below. Each country page carries its own record: how many events, the strongest on file, the average focal depth and a month-by-month breakdown.
All countries and territories
Sorted by event count. Click any column header to re-sort — by strongest recorded event, average depth, or alphabetically.
What the country rankings actually tell you
the United States leads the table with 156,045 recorded events, ahead of Puerto Rico on 3,751. That gap is real, but it is not purely a measure of how seismically dangerous one country is compared to the other.
Event counts by country reflect two independent things at once: how much the ground actually moves, and how closely anyone is listening. A country with a dense national seismic network detects and publishes thousands of magnitude 1–2 events that would go entirely unrecorded in a sparsely instrumented region. Comparing raw totals therefore compares instrumentation as much as hazard.
The magnitude 5-and-above column is the more honest comparison. Events that size are detected globally regardless of local network density, so those counts are close to complete everywhere and can be compared directly between countries.
By strongest event on file, the leaders are Russia (M8.7), Indonesia (M7.8), the Philippines (M7.8), Myanmar (M7.7), Japan (M7.6).
Why 1% of earthquakes have no country at all
1,807 of the events in our catalogue — 1% of the total — sit outside any national boundary. Most of the planet's seismicity happens beneath the ocean, along mid-ocean ridges where new crust forms and along the subduction trenches where old crust descends. Those events are recorded here under a regional name such as "Kermadec Islands region" or "South of the Fiji Islands" rather than a country.
This matters for the rankings above: the largest earthquakes on Earth are subduction-zone events, and many of them rupture offshore. A country can sit beside an extremely dangerous plate boundary and still show a modest count here, because the ruptures themselves happen under water.
Depth varies enormously between countries
The countries with the deepest average focal depths are Fiji (559 km), Bolivia (239 km), Malaysia (214 km). A high average is a tectonic signature: it means a slab of oceanic crust is descending beneath that country, producing intermediate-depth and deep-focus earthquakes that shallow crustal faulting cannot.
Countries whose events are almost entirely shallow are dominated by crustal faulting instead. That distinction matters more than the raw count, because for a given magnitude a shallow earthquake shakes the surface far harder than a deep one.