USGS Earthquake Data Scraper - Magnitude, Location, Depth

Fetches earthquake events from the official USGS FDSN GeoJSON API and exports flat, normalized records with magnitude, location, depth, timing, tsunami, and PAGER alert data. Built for anyone monitoring seismic activity — researchers, news teams, insurance risk analysts, and developers feeding earthquake alerts into dashboards or apps — who wants clean JSON instead of parsing GeoJSON themselves.

Why this scraper

• Reads the same official FDSN GeoJSON endpoint that API-based competitors use, so it inherits the source data's full completeness rather than a scraped subset.
• Flattens all 26 available properties into a single-level schema, including station/quality fields (nst, dmin, rms, gap) and sources/significance that many exports leave out.
• Priced at $0.00005 per run regardless of how many events are returned, matching the lowest tier on the store instead of per-result or higher flat-rate pricing for the same or fewer fields.

Output fields

Field	Type	Description
id	string	USGS unique event identifier
magnitude	number	Earthquake magnitude
magType	string	Magnitude scale used (e.g. md, ml, mww)
place	string	Human-readable location description
time	string	Event occurrence time, ISO 8601 UTC
updated	string	Last update time, ISO 8601 UTC
timezone	string	Local timezone offset for the event, if known
url	string	USGS event page URL
felt	integer	Number of felt reports submitted (DYFI)
cdi	number	Maximum reported intensity (Community Decimal Intensity)
mmi	number	Maximum estimated instrumental intensity
alert	string	PAGER alert level (green, yellow, orange, red)
status	string	Review status (automatic or reviewed)
tsunami	boolean	Whether a tsunami warning was associated with the event
significance	integer	USGS significance score of the event
network	string	Contributing seismic network code
code	string	Event code assigned by the contributing network
sources	string	Comma-separated list of contributing data sources
nst	integer	Number of seismic stations used to locate the event
dmin	number	Horizontal distance to nearest station in degrees
rms	number	Root-mean-square travel time residual
gap	number	Largest azimuthal gap between stations in degrees
type	string	Event type (earthquake, quarry blast, etc.)
title	string	Full summary title of the event
longitude	number	Epicenter longitude
latitude	number	Epicenter latitude
depthKm	number	Depth of the event in kilometers

Input

{
  "startUrls": [
    { "url": "https://earthquake.usgs.gov/fdsnws/event/1/query?format=geojson&limit=50" }
  ],
  "maxItems": 50
}

Output

{
  "id": "aka2026rxarpv",
  "magnitude": 3,
  "magType": "ml",
  "place": "24 km ENE of Beluga, Alaska",
  "time": "2026-09-09T18:35:04.816000+00:00",
  "updated": "2026-09-09T18:36:03.915000+00:00",
  "timezone": "",
  "url": "https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/aka2026rxarpv",
  "felt": null,
  "cdi": null,
  "mmi": null,
  "alert": "",
  "status": "automatic",
  "tsunami": false,
  "significance": 138,
  "network": "ak",
  "code": "a2026rxarpv",
  "sources": "ak",
  "nst": 42,
  "dmin": 0.5,
  "rms": 0.7,
  "gap": 43,
  "type": "earthquake",
  "title": "M 3.0 - 24 km ENE of Beluga, Alaska",
  "longitude": -150.672,
  "latitude": 61.243,
  "depthKm": 57.6
}

Pricing

Pay per event: $0.00005 per Actor run started, charged once regardless of how many earthquakes the run returns. A typical run pulling 50 events costs $0.00005 total — the same as a run pulling 1 event.

Use cases

• Feeding a Slack or PagerDuty alert bot that flags any event with alert set to "orange" or "red" for a disaster-response team.
• Backfilling a research dataset on regional seismicity by filtering magnitude, depthKm, and place for a specific fault zone over time.
• Powering a live earthquake map widget on a news site using latitude, longitude, and title for the last 50 events.