Query recent earthquake events via the USGS FDSN Event web service
domain: earthquake.usgs.gov · 6 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Send a GET request to https://earthquake.usgs.gov/fdsnws/event/1/query with parameters such as starttime, endtime, minmagnitude, and a bounding box (minlatitude/maxlatitude/minlongitude/maxlongitude)
Set format=geojson (or xml/text/csv) explicitly, since the default output format is QuakeML if unspecified
For a simple count of matching events before fetching full data, call the /count endpoint with the same parameters
Parse the GeoJSON FeatureCollection's features array for event id, magnitude, place, time, and coordinates
Apply additional filters (eventtype, minmagnitude/maxmagnitude, mindepth/maxdepth) to narrow large date ranges
For very large queries, page using the limit and offset parameters
Known gotchas
If format is omitted, the response defaults to QuakeML XML, not GeoJSON — always set format=geojson explicitly if JSON is expected
Very broad time ranges without magnitude/geographic filters can return extremely large result sets and may time out or be rejected — use /count first to check volume
Time parameters are UTC and must follow ISO 8601 format; local-time values without timezone conversion will silently shift the queried window
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