What 10,877 Earthquakes in 30 Days Look Like (Live USGS Data)
Somewhere on Earth, the ground is shifting right now. Most of it is far too gentle to feel — but it never stops. To see just how restless the planet is, we pulled every earthquake the U.S. Geological Survey recorded over a recent 30-day window into a public dataset on QuantumLayers and charted it. The tally: 10,877 events in a single month — one roughly every four minutes.
The dataset is marked public, and every chart below is drawn live: when this page loads, your browser calls QuantumLayers’ public chart endpoint and renders whatever the dataset currently holds — no API key, no login, no hard-coded numbers. Each figure also links to its own standalone ql-chart page on QuantumLayers.
Most earthquakes are far too small to feel
The single clearest pattern in seismology is that tiny quakes vastly outnumber big ones. About 78% of the month’s events fell below magnitude 2.3 — beneath the threshold most people can perceive. Notice the smooth decline, then a secondary bump around magnitude 4–5: those are larger events picked up globally by the national network, not just local sensors. At the very far right sits a lone magnitude 7.7 — the largest of the month.
Figure 1 — Distribution of earthquake magnitudes, fetched live from QuantumLayers. Source: USGS.
▶ Open the live ql-chart on QuantumLayers
A steady drumbeat, day after day
Grouped by day, the planet’s output is remarkably consistent: roughly 350 to 490 recorded quakes every single day. Any dip at the tail end isn’t a real lull — recent small events are still being reviewed and catalogued at snapshot time, so the last day or two always undercount.
Figure 2 — Recorded earthquakes per day, fetched live. Source: USGS.
▶ Open the live ql-chart on QuantumLayers
Who’s watching: the networks doing the detecting
Where a quake gets recorded depends on who has sensors nearby. Unsurprisingly, the tectonically busy — and densely instrumented — regions of Alaska and the U.S. West Coast account for most of the catalogue. Alaska alone reported over 2,000 events in 30 days.
▶ Open the live ql-chart on QuantumLayers
Figure 3 — Share of events by reporting network, fetched live. ak = Alaska, ci = Southern California, nc = Northern California, us = USGS National, tx = TexNet, av = Alaska Volcano Observatory, uu = Utah. Source: USGS.
What the statistics reveal
Charts show the shape; the statistics pin it down. We ran QuantumLayers’ automated statistical analysis across every numeric column in the dataset — testing distributions, outliers, and group effects. Four findings stood out.
Almost everything happens in the shallow crust. The median earthquake depth is just 7.5 km, and the middle half of all events fall between 3.3 and 14.2 km down. But the distribution is wildly lopsided — a skewness of 7.4 — because a long tail of deep-focus quakes reaches all the way down to 665 km, the crushing depths of subduction zones. QuantumLayers flagged roughly 15% of depth readings as statistical outliers; here that isn’t bad data, it’s real physics.
▶ Open the live ql-chart on QuantumLayers
The catalogue is overwhelmingly micro-quakes. Magnitude has a median of just 1.47, with the middle 50% of events falling between 0.82 and 2.2. The full range runs from -1.25 — a tremor no one would ever feel — up to the month’s headline 7.7.
How a quake is measured depends on where it is. QuantumLayers’ analysis of variance found that the magnitude scale used to size an event (magType) has a large, highly significant effect on its location (η² ≈ 0.42, p < 0.0001). That isn’t geology — it’s methodology: moment-magnitude (mw) readings, typically reserved for larger global events, cluster in different regions than the local scales that regional networks apply to everyday small quakes.
How this was built
No spreadsheets, no manual downloads. The USGS feed was connected as a public dataset in QuantumLayers, which ingested and typed all 22 columns. Each chart above is rendered with Chart.js, populated at page-load by a single POST to QuantumLayers’ ql_get_chart_data endpoint. Because the dataset is public, that call needs no authentication — the browser gets back a ready-to-draw Chart.js config and paints it. The “Open as a live ql-chart” links point at QuantumLayers’ hosted ql-chart page, which renders the same visualization from nothing but URL parameters. Want a different cut — depth vs. magnitude, quakes by region, deep-focus events? The data is public; go explore.
Data: U.S. Geological Survey Earthquake Hazards Program. Magnitudes and counts reflect the dataset at request time and may be revised as events are reviewed.
This article is part of an ongoing series in which we analyze public datasets using QuantumLayers, our own data-analysis platform. Each post takes an openly available dataset, loads it into QuantumLayers, and shares what the charts and statistics reveal.
