USGS Earthquake Scraper

Pull earthquake records straight from the official USGS global catalog — magnitude, epicenter, depth, origin time, PAGER impact alerts, tsunami flags, and community "Did You Feel It?" counts, exported as one clean row per event. Search by magnitude, date, a circle around any city, a region box, depth band, alert level, or event type, with global coverage back to the early 1900s and near-real-time updates. Built for seismologists, insurers, news teams, and GIS analysts who need authoritative, structured quake data without wrestling with a raw scientific API.

Why This Scraper?

• The official USGS catalog — the authoritative global source — every record comes from the United States Geological Survey's own earthquake catalog, the same dataset cited by researchers, governments, and news desks worldwide
• Four geographic search modes — search worldwide, within a circle around any point (lat/lon + radius in km), inside a rectangular region box (four edges), or anywhere and filter afterward
• PAGER impact alerts (green / yellow / orange / red) — filter to only the events USGS flagged as having limited, some, significant, or severe human impact
• 40+ event types — keep only true earthquakes, or include quarry blasts, explosions, ice quakes, mining explosions, and landslides that share the catalog
• Impact metrics on every event — felt-report counts (DYFI), CDI and MMI shaking intensities, a tsunami flag, and the USGS significance score, all in one row
• Coverage from the early 1900s to minutes ago — run historical sweeps across decades or pull the latest events from the past 30 days
• Sort by newest, oldest, strongest, or weakest — order results by time or magnitude in either direction, so the events that matter to you land at the top
• 20 typed fields, ISO-8601 UTC timestamps — clean magnitude types, decimal-degree coordinates, depth in kilometers, and a direct link to each USGS event page — no epoch integers, no nested blobs
• Public-domain US government data — USGS earthquake data carries no usage fee or license restriction, so you own what you extract

Use Cases

Research & Science

• Build seismicity datasets for a fault zone, subduction margin, or tectonic plate boundary
• Study aftershock sequences by pulling every event within a circle around a mainshock
• Analyze depth distributions across a region with the depth-band filter

Insurance & Risk Modeling

• Quantify earthquake exposure for a portfolio by region box and magnitude floor
• Feed historical catalogs into catastrophe and probabilistic seismic hazard models
• Track significant-and-larger events near insured assets in near-real-time

News & Media

• Monitor for orange and red PAGER alerts to break high-impact quake stories first
• Pull the strongest events of the past day, week, or year ranked by magnitude
• Enrich coverage with felt-report counts and shaking intensity per event

Disaster Response & Public Safety

• Surface events with high felt-report counts to gauge where people are affected
• Filter to tsunami-flagged events along coastlines for early situational awareness
• Build alerting workflows around a city using circle search plus an alert-level floor

GIS & Mapping Applications

• Power interactive quake maps with decimal-degree epicenter coordinates and depth
• Generate region-specific layers using bounding-box search for any country or state
• Keep a rolling map layer fresh by pulling recent events on a schedule

Getting Started

Recent Significant Quakes

The minimum useful input — a magnitude floor and a start date:

{
    "minMagnitude": 4.5,
    "startTime": "2024-01-01"
}

Earthquakes Near a City

Find every event within 300 km of San Francisco in 2024:

{
    "latitude": 37.77,
    "longitude": -122.42,
    "maxRadiusKm": 300,
    "minMagnitude": 2.5,
    "startTime": "2024-01-01",
    "endTime": "2024-12-31"
}

Region Box + Alert Level, Strongest First

Pull high-impact quakes inside a rectangle over Japan, ranked by magnitude:

{
    "minLatitude": 30,
    "maxLatitude": 45,
    "minLongitude": 130,
    "maxLongitude": 145,
    "minMagnitude": 5,
    "alertLevel": "yellow",
    "eventType": "earthquake",
    "orderBy": "magnitude",
    "maxResults": 500
}

Input Reference

Time Range

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
startTime	string	"2024-01-01"	Only include earthquakes on or after this date (YYYY-MM-DD or full date-and-time). Leave empty for the last 30 days.
endTime	string	—	Only include earthquakes on or before this date. Leave empty to include everything up to now.

Magnitude & Depth

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
minMagnitude	number	4.5	Only include earthquakes at or above this magnitude (0–10). A higher floor returns fewer, larger events.
maxMagnitude	number	—	Only include earthquakes at or below this magnitude (0–10).
minDepth	number	—	Only return earthquakes at least this deep, in kilometers (events deeper than this value). Depth increases downward, so a higher number keeps only the deeper quakes. Leave empty for no minimum.
maxDepth	number	—	Only return earthquakes no deeper than this, in kilometers (events shallower than this value). Depth increases downward, so a lower number keeps only the shallower quakes. Leave empty for no maximum.

Location

Use the circle fields together, or the box fields together — leave both groups empty to search worldwide.

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
latitude	number	—	Center latitude of a circle search (−90 to 90).
longitude	number	—	Center longitude of a circle search (−180 to 180).
maxRadiusKm	number	—	How far from the center point to search, in kilometers.
minLatitude	number	—	South edge (min latitude) of a rectangular region.
maxLatitude	number	—	North edge (max latitude) of a rectangular region.
minLongitude	number	—	West edge (min longitude) of a rectangular region.
maxLongitude	number	—	East edge (max longitude) of a rectangular region.

Classification & Sorting

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
alertLevel	select	"Any (no filter)"	Minimum PAGER impact alert: Any, Green or higher (limited impact), Yellow or higher (some impact), Orange or higher (significant impact), Red only (severe impact).
eventType	select	"Earthquake"	Kind of event: Any, Earthquake, Quarry blast, Explosion, Ice quake, Mining explosion. Defaults to Earthquake to exclude non-quake events.
minFeltReports	integer	—	Only include earthquakes that at least this many people reported feeling ("Did You Feel It?").
orderBy	select	"Newest first (by time)"	Result order: Newest first, Oldest first, Strongest first (by magnitude), Weakest first (by magnitude).

Output Size

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
maxResults	integer	1000	The most earthquakes to return for this run (1 to 20,000). Narrow your search with the filters above when looking at long time ranges.

Output

Each record is one earthquake with 20 structured fields:

{
    "eventId": "us6000m0xz",
    "magnitude": 7.2,
    "magnitudeType": "mww",
    "place": "12 km SW of Acari, Peru",
    "time": "2024-06-28T05:36:36.902Z",
    "updated": "2025-02-09T14:16:45.954Z",
    "latitude": -15.65,
    "longitude": -74.69,
    "depth": 27.5,
    "tsunami": true,
    "felt": 115,
    "cdi": 8.3,
    "mmi": 7.689,
    "alert": "yellow",
    "significance": 893,
    "status": "reviewed",
    "eventType": "earthquake",
    "title": "M 7.2 - 12 km SW of Acari, Peru",
    "url": "https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us6000m0xz",
    "extractedAt": "2026-06-19T20:47:14Z"
}

Core Fields

Field	Type	Description
eventId	string	Unique USGS event identifier.
magnitude	number	Magnitude value of the event.
magnitudeType	string	How magnitude was measured (e.g. mww, mb, ml, md).
place	string	Human-readable location description.
time	string	Event origin time, ISO-8601 (UTC).
updated	string	When the record was last revised by USGS, ISO-8601 (UTC).
eventType	string	Event classification (earthquake, quarry blast, explosion, …).
status	string	Review status — reviewed (analyst-confirmed) or automatic.

Location

Field	Type	Description
latitude	number	Epicenter latitude in decimal degrees.
longitude	number	Epicenter longitude in decimal degrees.
depth	number	Hypocenter depth below the surface, in kilometers.

Impact

Field	Type	Description
tsunami	boolean	Whether the event carried a tsunami indicator.
felt	number | null	Number of "Did You Feel It?" community reports.
cdi	number | null	Community Decimal Intensity (reported shaking).
mmi	number | null	Modified Mercalli Intensity (estimated shaking).
alert	string | null	PAGER impact alert: green, yellow, orange, or red.
significance	number	USGS significance score combining magnitude, felt, and impact.
title	string	Full event title (e.g. M 7.2 - 12 km SW of Acari, Peru).
url	string	Direct link to the USGS event page.
extractedAt	string	ISO-8601 timestamp of when this record was captured.

Tips for Best Results

• Keep any single search under 20,000 events — the catalog caps one search at 20,000 matches. Narrow by magnitude, date range, or region to stay under the cap and get complete results instead of a "narrow your search" notice.
• Raise the magnitude floor for big historical sweeps — decades of small quakes number in the millions. A minMagnitude of 5 or 6 keeps multi-year searches fast and well under the cap.
• Use circle search for "within X km of a city" — latitude + longitude + maxRadiusKm is more accurate than a box for distance-from-a-point questions like aftershock studies.
• Use the region box for countries and states — four edges (minLatitude/maxLatitude/minLongitude/maxLongitude) cleanly fence a rectangular area such as a country or state.
• Filter by eventType to drop noise — the catalog mixes in quarry blasts and explosions; the default Earthquake keeps only genuine quakes.
• Set minFeltReports to find quakes people actually noticed — a floor of 10 or more surfaces events with real community impact, ideal for news and response workflows.
• Sort with orderBy to put the right events first — Strongest first (by magnitude) for biggest-events lists, Newest first for live monitoring.

Pricing

From $0.90 per 1,000 results — among the lowest rates for authoritative earthquake data, with no monthly rental. Bronze, Silver, and Gold subscribers pay progressively less; the table below shows total cost at each discount tier.

Results	No discount	Bronze	Silver	Gold
100	$0.11	$0.10	$0.10	$0.09
1,000	$1.05	$1.00	$0.95	$0.90
10,000	$10.50	$10.00	$9.50	$9.00
100,000	$105.00	$100.00	$95.00	$90.00

A "result" is one earthquake record returned in your dataset. No compute or time-based charges — you pay per result, plus a small fixed per-run start fee. Platform fees depend on your Apify plan.

Integrations

Export data in JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, or RSS. Connect to 1,500+ apps via:

• Zapier / Make / n8n — Workflow automation
• Google Sheets — Direct spreadsheet export
• Slack / Email — Notifications on new results
• Webhooks — Trigger custom APIs when a run completes
• Apify API — Full programmatic access

Legal & Ethical Use

This actor collects earthquake records from the official USGS Earthquake Hazards Program catalog, which is public-domain data produced by the United States Geological Survey and carries no usage fee or license restriction. You are responsible for using the data lawfully and for complying with applicable terms of service. When republishing, a credit to the USGS is appreciated and, for some uses, expected. Do not use the data for any unlawful or harmful purpose.