Live Earthquake Tracker

01Earthquakes Right Now

Each circle is an earthquake, sized by magnitude and coloured by how recently it struck. A pulsing ring means it happened in the past hour. The map and the list below check the USGS feed every 60 seconds; anything new flashes as it arrives, so you can leave this page open.

Source: USGS real-time earthquake feeds (all magnitudes, past 24 hours). Magnitudes are preliminary and are often revised in the first hour. Small quakes are mostly recorded in the U.S., where the seismic networks are densest, so the "all sizes" view leans American; outside the U.S. the feed is complete from roughly magnitude 4.5.

02The Biggest Earthquakes This Week

Every magnitude 4.5 and larger earthquake in the past seven days, biggest first. USGS adds a PAGER alert (green, yellow, orange or red) when it estimates casualties and losses for a significant event.

Magnitude 6 and larger in the past 30 days: 13. From 2000 to 2021 the world averaged about 150 magnitude 6 or larger earthquakes a year by the USGS count, roughly one every two to three days.

03The Costliest Earthquakes in History

Measured in dollars, the most expensive earthquakes are not the deadliest ones. They are the ones that hit rich, dense, built-up places, which is why Japan has five of the top twelve. The 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami is the most expensive natural disaster ever recorded, at about $210 billion, and insurers covered up to about a fifth of it.

Economic losses in U.S. dollars as reported when they happened, mostly from Munich Re's NatCatSERVICE; Sichuan, Myanmar and Haiti use World Bank and government damage assessments, and Chuetsu, Izmit, Noto, Chi-Chi, Chuetsu-oki and the Indian Ocean tsunami use the NOAA NCEI database. Estimates vary a lot by source: Turkey-Syria 2023 runs from $34 billion (World Bank, Turkey's direct damage only) to $104 billion (Turkish government). 2024 dollars use the U.S. CPI-U.

04What Earthquakes Do to Markets

A big earthquake hits markets through three doors: the stock index of the country that was hit, its currency, and the insurance industry. The first-week moves can be violent. These are the episodes that traders still talk about.

05The Deadliest Earthquakes

Death tolls depend far more on buildings than on magnitude. The 1556 Shaanxi earthquake killed an estimated 830,000 people, many of them living in cave dwellings dug into soft loess cliffs. Haiti's magnitude 7.0 in 2010 was a fraction of the size of the 2011 Japan earthquake, and yet by the Haitian government's count it killed about 17 times as many people as Japan's earthquake and tsunami, counting Japan's missing.

Best estimates from the NOAA NCEI Significant Earthquake Database, which includes deaths from tsunamis and fires the quakes caused. Tolls before 1900 are rough historical estimates. Sichuan includes the missing.

06The Largest Earthquakes Ever Measured

Almost all of the biggest earthquakes since instruments began are subduction quakes, where one tectonic plate dives under another, and most are around the Pacific. Four on this list hit Alaska. The 1960 Valdivia earthquake in Chile, magnitude 9.5, is the largest ever recorded. It released nearly three times the energy of the 1964 Alaska quake, the largest in U.S. history.

Magnitudes from the USGS list of the largest earthquakes since 1900, plus the July 2025 Kamchatka earthquake (M8.8). Dates are in UTC, so a few fall a day after the local date (the 1964 Alaska quake struck on the evening of Mar 27 local time). Deaths from NOAA NCEI.

07How Magnitude Works

The magnitude scale is logarithmic. Each whole step up means about 10 times more ground motion on a seismograph and about 32 times more energy. So a magnitude 7 releases about 1,000 times the energy of a magnitude 5. Try any two sizes:

Small earthquakes are vastly more common than big ones. Using the USGS count of worldwide earthquakes from 2000 to 2021, the world averaged:

Annual averages are our simple means of the USGS 2000-2021 worldwide table. The USGS's own long-term rule of thumb is about 15 magnitude 7s and one magnitude 8 or larger each year.

08Where America Is Exposed

Most Americans think of earthquakes as a California problem. California does have the most damaging ones, but the risk map is far wider than that.

The money side: each dollar spent on seismic retrofits of older buildings saves about $13 in future losses, and each dollar spent building new ones to current code saves about $12, according to the National Institute of Building Sciences. Meanwhile only about one in eight California homeowners carries earthquake insurance. The California Earthquake Authority, which writes most of it, had just over one million policies at the end of 2024.

09Frequently Asked Questions

10Method and Sources

The live map, list, week table and cover numbers come straight from the U.S. Geological Survey's real-time GeoJSON feeds: every earthquake of any size in the past 24 hours, and magnitude 4.5 and up over 7 and 30 days. The page loads a server-side snapshot that is at most a few minutes old, then your browser checks USGS every minute. The United States count matches the place names USGS gives (states, Puerto Rico and the U.S. territories). Plate boundaries are from Peter Bird's 2003 model.

• USGS real-time earthquake feeds (GeoJSON)
• USGS: 20 largest earthquakes in the world since 1900
• NOAA NCEI Global Significant Earthquake Database (deaths, damage)
• Munich Re NatCatSERVICE via the Insurance Information Institute (economic and insured losses)
• FEMA P-366 (2023): Hazus estimated annualized earthquake losses for the United States
• USGS 2023 National Seismic Hazard Model (released Jan 2024) and USGS: nearly half of Americans exposed
• USGS: magnitude, energy release and shaking intensity and the USGS worldwide earthquake counts, 2000-2021
• World Bank GRADE reports (Turkey 2023, Myanmar 2025), the Haiti Post-Disaster Needs Assessment and the World Bank's Wenchuan assessment
• California Department of Insurance, California Earthquake Authority and the California State Assembly Insurance Committee (earthquake insurance take-up)
• Reuters, CNN and the Financial Times reporting on the Nikkei, yen and G7 intervention in March 2011; Borsa Istanbul notices, February 2023; Singapore National Library Board on Barings

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