🌍 USGS Earthquake Scraper

🚀 Export real-time global earthquake data in seconds. Pull live seismic events from the USGS public feed - magnitude, depth, coordinates, tsunami warnings, and significance scores - no API key required.

The USGS Earthquake Hazards Program publishes real-time GeoJSON feeds updated every 60 seconds covering every seismic event detected by the global network. This actor fetches those feeds directly and delivers structured, analysis-ready earthquake records to your dataset - no browser automation, no authentication, no rate-limit workarounds.

The data comes straight from official USGS servers (earthquake.usgs.gov), the gold standard for seismic monitoring data trusted by governments, researchers, and emergency response teams worldwide.

Coverage

The USGS network monitors seismic activity globally across all magnitudes. Pre-built feeds cover the last hour, day, week, or 30 days. The custom date range mode queries the FDSNWS API and can retrieve historical events back to 1900. Each event record includes 14 structured fields covering identification, location, depth, magnitude, tsunami status, and USGS significance scoring.

Target Audience

Who	What they need
Emergency managers	Real-time alerts for M4.5+ events near population centers
Seismologists & researchers	Historical datasets for pattern analysis and modeling
Journalists	Breaking news data on significant earthquakes
Insurance/reinsurance	Exposure analysis for earthquake-prone regions
App developers	Live feed data for earthquake notification apps
GIS analysts	Lat/lon + depth data for spatial mapping

📋 What the USGS Earthquake Scraper does

• Fetches from official USGS GeoJSON feeds - updated every 60 seconds
• Supports pre-built feeds: last hour, last day, last week, last 30 days
• Custom date range mode for historical data via the FDSNWS API
• Magnitude filtering (0 to 10) to focus on events relevant to your use case
• Delivers 14 structured fields per earthquake event including coordinates, depth, tsunami warning flag, and USGS significance score
• Handles both "reviewed" and "automatic" status events

💡 Why it matters: USGS earthquake data is the authoritative global seismic record. Raw GeoJSON feeds require parsing, filtering, and structuring. This actor does that instantly - output is CSV/Excel/JSON-ready from the first run.

📊 Data fields

Each record includes: depth, id, latitude, longitude, magnitude, place, results, scrapedAt, significance, status, time, tsunamiWarning, updated, url. These field names come straight from the actor's dataset schema, so what you see here is what lands in your dataset.

⚠️ Good to Know: Custom date ranges (startTime/endTime) query the FDSNWS event API and can return large result sets for long periods. Always set maxItems when querying extended historical ranges to avoid timeouts.

🚀 How to use

1. Create a free Apify account w/ $5 credit
2. Open the actor and click Try for free
3. Set your timeRange (last_hour / last_day / last_week / last_month) or provide custom startTime/endTime
4. Set minMagnitude to filter by event size (e.g. 2.5 for local significant events, 4.5 for globally notable)
5. Set maxItems to control dataset size
6. Click Start and download results as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML

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💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for 50+ ready-to-run public data scrapers covering aviation, finance, government, science, and more.

Disclaimer: This actor uses the publicly available USGS Earthquake Hazards Program GeoJSON feeds (earthquake.usgs.gov). All data is provided by the United States Geological Survey and is in the public domain. ParseForge is not affiliated with USGS. Use of this data is subject to USGS terms of service. This actor is provided for informational and research purposes only and should not be used as the sole basis for emergency response decisions.

🆘 Need Help?

If you hit a bug, have questions about setup, or need a scraper we haven't built yet, open our contact form or write to parseforge@protonmail.com. We also take on paid custom data projects.

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