About QuakeIndex
QuakeIndex takes public earthquake data and answers the questions people actually ask after they feel something: how big was it, where was it, when, and did anyone else feel it. Then it answers a question nobody else computes — is this normal for here?
Who publishes it
QuakeIndex is published by Voitto Virta LLC, a small independent publisher in the United States. Contact: team at voittovirta.com. We are not a government agency, not a research institution, and not affiliated with USGS or any other agency whose data we use.
What is on the site
- A page for every earthquake, live within a minute of USGS publishing it: magnitude, depth and local time; the town it is named after; how much energy it released, compared with quakes people remember; how many people reported feeling it; what has been recorded near it since; and every revision USGS has made, shown rather than overwritten. Today's earthquakes
- Town pages — every earthquake within 30 km of a town since 2016, the strongest shaking each is estimated to have caused in the town, the large quakes before 2016, and the nearest mapped faults. Earthquakes by town
- State and county pages with the QuakeIndex score: this week's activity as a percentile of the place's own ten-year record, with the 30-day record, the largest quakes on record and the M5+ history since 1900. Browse by state
- Fault pages for the faults in the USGS Quaternary Fault and Fold Database: how fast each slips, when it last broke the surface, and what has been recorded near it. The faults
- "Was that an earthquake?" — checks what was recorded near you in the last hour and whether it was large enough, at your distance, to have been felt. Ask it
- Guides to magnitude, intensity, depth, aftershocks, early warning, retrofits, insurance and what to do during a quake, each with its sources and the date it was last checked. Learn
- An open API and an MCP server for developers and AI assistants, with the same numbers as the pages. API · MCP
Where the data comes from
All earthquake data is from the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program, which is in the public domain. USGS is the record of authority for every event value on this site, and every event page links back to it. Place names and coordinates are from the US Census Bureau Gazetteer and GeoNames; fault traces from the USGS Quaternary Fault and Fold Database. The full method, with every source and every rule →
How it is written
- Every live value shows its age and its source. A number with no timestamp, or a feed that has gone quiet, is shown as stale rather than as a confident answer.
- Plain words, no alarm. No "devastating", no countdowns, no manufactured urgency. Earthquakes are interesting enough as they are.
- The record, not a forecast. Scores, histories and shaking estimates describe what has been recorded. Where USGS publishes an aftershock forecast, we show it, attributed, and add nothing to it.
- Revisions are shown. When USGS revises a magnitude or a location, the page says what changed and when.
What we do not do
- We do not predict earthquakes. Nobody can. Our activity score describes what has already been recorded.
- We do not issue warnings. Early warning is ShakeAlert, through Wireless Emergency Alerts and the MyShake app.
- We do not collect felt reports. Report what you felt to USGS Did You Feel It?, where it feeds the official intensity maps.
How it is paid for
QuakeIndex is free to read and needs no account. It is paid for by advertising through Google AdSense. Ads never appear inside an answer — an earthquake page's answer block or the "was that an earthquake?" answer — and nothing on a page is written or ranked to suit an advertiser. See the privacy policy for what advertising and analytics collect, and the advertising and affiliate disclosure.
Corrections
If a number here is wrong, or shows no timestamp and no source, that is a defect and we want to hear about it: team at voittovirta.com, with the page address. We correct the page and, where the cause was a rule rather than one value, every page the rule produced. Contact