USGS Earthquake Catalog Change Evidence API

Read selected catalog metadata for a bounded historical event window. Returns USGS event ID, reported magnitude/type, event/update milliseconds, place, point coordinates/depth, review status and source URL. Intended for catalog QA, maps and historical data pipelines; not earthquake prediction, emergency dispatch or a push-alert service.

One official USGS FDSN GeoJSON query, date window1..31 days since1970, minMagnitude0..10 and at most50 events. Source order is descending origin time. No global history crawl, unbounded paging, earthquake forecasts, casualty/damage inference or notification. At the event cap, more results are unknown and complete=false; fewer results describe only the submitted filters, not absence of all earthquakes.204 No Content is a valid empty matching query;404/other errors are not empty data. Provider magnitude, coordinates, depth and review status are copied and can be revised. Timestamp values remain reported milliseconds; API date boundaries are not changed. Additional event/detail URLs are never fetched. No safety or scientific completeness guarantee beyond the selected query contract.

Quick start

{"startDate": "2025-01-01", "endDate": "2025-01-03", "minMagnitude": 4, "maxEvents": 2}

Pricing and budget

0.0007 USD per emitted catalog event observation (0.7 USD per1000), plus0.005 USD startup at default256MB. Higher memory can multiply startup events; check effective Store pricing. Failed/empty sources do not emit result charges; startup can still apply. At zero result budget, input validation occurs but no upstream request is sent, and rowsAvailable is null (unknown). A positive budget can request the bounded source set before output; emission stops at the result cap and complete=false/PARTIAL_BUDGET reports truncation.

Snapshot, integration and limits

Use dataset rows together with OUTPUT and SNAPSHOT. Pass SNAPSHOT.previousHashes as previousHashes in a later run. NO_BASELINE/FIRST_SEEN/UNCHANGED/CHANGED compare only selected metadata including itemKey and sourceUrl; missing records are not deletions. FIRST_SEEN means absent from the supplied baseline. There is no persistent hidden state or automatic polling. Export JSON/CSV/Excel through the default dataset.

API example: POST https://api.apify.com/v2/actors/soilair~usgs-earthquake-catalog-change-evidence-api/runs with your Apify Authorization header and the JSON input above. Poll the returned run; read dataset items and OUTPUT/SNAPSHOT records using its store IDs. Do not place tokens or confidential data in input. No upstream key is needed. Results live in Apify run storage according to retention; no separate analytics service.

Only fixed HTTPS provider endpoints are constructed from validated identifiers. Public-IP DNS validation, pinned connections, TLS hostname verification,2MiB decoded responses, approximately95 seconds of network budget, at most5 same-provider redirects. Official API calls are distinct from website crawling; no arbitrary URLs or HTML pages. No linked documents/files are fetched. Queries are sequential with1-second spacing. Provider403/429 or Retry-After stops later calls; retry instructions are reported and no retry/proxy/circumvention is attempted. Shared IP limits and changes to upstream services can still block runs. Caller must respect provider headers and cache/reduce repeated requests. Text is data and should not be executed.

Developed with AI assistance. Tests and live/cloud comparisons qualify the selected-field contract; they do not prove commercial demand, provider uptime or a legal/license determination. Support: share a run ID and expected fields, without credentials or private material.

References: https://earthquake.usgs.gov/fdsnws/event/1/