Editorial Policy and Data Sources

Every earthquake on this site originates from the United States Geological Survey real-time feeds. We ingest the USGS catalogue continuously, so a newly located event normally appears here within minutes.

We record the values USGS publishes: magnitude, focal depth, epicentre coordinates, origin time, review status, significance score and the USGS tsunami-information link flag. That flag only means the USGS event page links to authoritative NOAA tsunami information for a large oceanic event; it does not indicate that a tsunami exists or that a warning was issued. We do not adjust or re-estimate any of these fields.

Country and nearest-settlement names are added by reverse-geocoding the epicentre against OpenStreetMap data. This is our own enrichment, not USGS data, and it is the field most likely to be imprecise — particularly for offshore events, where the nearest named place may be a long way from the epicentre.

Our catalogue begins on 2024-12-15. Earlier events are not published here; use the USGS archive for those.

Initial magnitudes are computed automatically within minutes of an event and are revised as more seismic stations report. A shift of a few tenths of a magnitude in the hours after an earthquake is normal and expected.

We follow those revisions: when USGS updates an event, our record updates with it. The figure shown on a page is the current USGS value at the time the page was served, not the value first reported.

Two distinct kinds of text appear on this site, and it matters which is which.

Derived analysis — the depth explanations, energy calculations, aftershock counts, felt-radius estimates and regional rankings on event pages — is generated deterministically from the event record using published seismological relationships. Energy figures use the Gutenberg–Richter relation; aftershock and ranking figures are direct queries against our catalogue. These are calculations, not prose written about the event, and they contain no interpretation beyond the formulas stated in our reference guides.

News reports — the articles under Earthquake News — are drafted with AI assistance from the source material cited at the foot of each article, then reviewed before publication. Every article lists its sources. We disclose this because you should know how what you are reading was made.

Reports carry the Earthquake.now Newsroom byline. That is a house byline for our editorial desk, not a named individual — we do not attribute AI-assisted drafts to an invented author.

We do not issue warnings, alerts or advisories, and this site must not be used as a source of emergency information. Tsunami messages come from the responsible regional warning centre; evacuation instructions come from your local emergency management authority. Our tsunami field reports what USGS recorded, which is not the same as an active alert for your coastline.

We do not predict earthquakes. Nobody can. Any site claiming to forecast a specific earthquake at a specific place and time is wrong, and we say so at greater length in our guide to prediction versus forecasting.

We do not estimate casualties or damage independently. Where a report mentions them, the figure comes from a cited source and reflects that source at the time of writing.

If something here is wrong, we want to fix it. That applies to a mistaken location name, a misstated figure in an article, or an analysis that misreads the data.

Corrections to the underlying seismic data should go to USGS, since we mirror their catalogue and will pick up the change automatically. Everything else — our enrichment, our analysis, our reports — is ours to fix, and we will note material corrections on the affected page.

The seismological background used throughout the site is set out in our reference guides, including what magnitude measures, why focal depth often matters more than magnitude, and how earthquakes generate tsunamis.