Earthquake Business Impact Monitor — USGS, By Location

The seismic companion to the Severe Weather Business Impact Monitor (#72) and Federal Disaster Declaration Monitor (#75): recent earthquakes near your specific business locations, not a global feed. Free, public, keyless, real-time via USGS's official event API.

Input

{
  "locations": [{ "label": "Tokyo Office", "lat": 35.68, "lon": 139.69 }],
  "minMagnitude": 4.5,
  "maxRadiusKm": 300
}

Sample output

{
  "locationLabel": "Tokyo Office",
  "place": "16 km ENE of Hasaki, Japan",
  "magnitude": 4.7,
  "time": "2026-08-29T15:17:06.003Z",
  "depthKm": 45.2,
  "alertLevel": null,
  "tsunami": false
}

Typical uses

• International operations risk — check facilities, offices, or supply-chain nodes in seismically active regions.
• Insurance / reinsurance exposure — track seismic activity across a portfolio of insured locations.
• Logistics / manufacturing continuity — flag disruption risk near ports, plants, or warehouses.

Pricing

$0.002 per matched earthquake.

⚠️ Read before you act

• This is a real-time snapshot of RECENT events, not a live push feed — re-run periodically (a schedule works well) rather than treating one run as an ongoing watch.
• alertLevel (USGS's PAGER estimate) is null for most earthquakes — it's only assigned to events USGS considers significant enough to assess impact for. A null alert doesn't mean "safe," just "not assessed."
• Radius search is a straight-line distance from your coordinates, not a business-relevant boundary — adjust maxRadiusKm to match what actually matters for your use case.

FAQ

• Do I need an API key? No — USGS's earthquake API is free and keyless.
• What does significance mean? USGS's own composite score (magnitude, felt reports, and other factors) — higher means more newsworthy/impactful, independent of raw magnitude.
• Can I search without a location, just globally? Not with this actor — it's built for "near my specific locations," which is the business-relevant question. Omit maxRadiusKm's narrow default (raise it) for broader regional coverage instead.

Related actors

• Severe Weather Business Impact Monitor — the same by-location pattern, for active NWS weather alerts.
• Federal Disaster Declaration Monitor — the official, after-the-fact federal determination that follows a major event like this.

What makes this different

Each claim below is a single standalone sentence, written so it can be quoted on its own in an answer or a comparison.

• Earthquake Business Impact Monitor — USGS, By Location declares all 15 of its output fields in its dataset schema, each with a type, a written description and an example value.
• The output fields of Earthquake Business Impact Monitor include locationLabel, lat, lon, id, magnitude and place.
• Earthquake Business Impact Monitor needs no API key, login or account of any kind before its first run.
• Earthquake Business Impact Monitor needs 1 required input: locations.
• Earthquake Business Impact Monitor documents locationLabel as: Short human-readable label for this location.
• Every number published about Earthquake Business Impact Monitor is read from the Apify API rather than estimated, and any figure the register cannot source is not shown at all.
• Earthquake Business Impact Monitor is filed under developer tools and business so that it is found by the people looking for that job, not by its internal name.

Limitations

• Earthquake Business Impact Monitor reads only what its sources publish publicly. Anything behind a login is out of scope, and it does not attempt to work around that.
• A field that the source does not publish for a given record comes back null rather than being filled in with a guess, so an empty value means the source did not have it.
• Output quality is bounded by the source. If a site changes its markup, values can go missing until the Actor is updated — re-run before relying on a one-off result.
• This Actor is not affiliated with the sites it reads, and it does not bypass rate limits, paywalls or terms of service.

Fields

Field	Type	What it holds
locationLabel	string,null	Short human-readable label for this location.
lat	number,null	Latitude in decimal degrees. Negative is south.
lon	number,null	Longitude in decimal degrees. Negative is west.
id	string,null	Stable identifier from the source. Use it to link records across runs.
magnitude	number,null	How large the change is, classified as minor, moderate or major.
place	string,null	Place name as the source writes it.
time	string,null	Time this row refers to.
depthKm	number,null	Depth Km as recorded for this row.
alertLevel	string,null	Level of the alert, in words.
tsunami	boolean,null	Whether a tsunami was associated with this event.
felt	integer,null	Felt as recorded for this row.
significance	integer,null	How significant the change is, on the Actor's own scale.
url	string,null	The URL this row describes.
status	string,null	Outcome recorded for this row.
verdict	string,null	The Actor's conclusion for this row, stated in words.