Export Historical USGS Earthquake Events

Historical earthquake research needs explicit time, magnitude, and completeness boundaries. A giant undifferentiated download makes it hard to know whether an upstream cap truncated the catalog. The USGS Earthquake Scraper lets each extract carry its own bounded query and normalized fields.

Partition the catalog deliberately

Choose a calendar interval and magnitude threshold that keeps the expected event count below the service limit.

{"startTime":"2025-01-01","endTime":"2025-12-31","minMagnitude":6,"orderBy":"magnitude","maxResults":2000}

Record the input, collection date, and returned count. If the count equals the requested maximum, treat the extract as possibly truncated and divide the time range. Combine batches by event ID, retaining the newest updated record when duplicates overlap.

Create geometry from longitude and latitude and store depth separately in kilometers. Event place is a readable description, not a stable administrative boundary. Spatial studies should join coordinates to a documented boundary dataset. Magnitude types can differ, so comparisons may require seismological context beyond a single numeric column.

Quality-related fields such as station count, RMS, azimuthal gap, and minimum distance help researchers assess solutions but should not be reduced to an invented universal quality score without domain justification. Alert and felt-report fields reflect availability and public reporting, not uniform impact measurement.

Cite the USGS source URL in derived work and describe catalog filters precisely. The result is suitable for research and visualization, not event prediction or emergency decisions.

Archive the exact extraction input alongside published figures so another analyst can reproduce the selected catalog slice and understand exclusions.