About Quakewire
Quakewire watches the world's earthquake feeds and republishes what matters — as a page, a notification, and a post — usually within minutes of an agency releasing its first solution.
What this is
An independent project, not a government service and not affiliated with any seismological agency. It exists because official feeds are fast and accurate but awkward to follow: they are built for machines and researchers, not for someone who just felt their house move and wants to know what that was.
Every earthquake above the thresholds below becomes three things at once: a page on this site, an alert on any device that has asked for one, and a post on social media. Nobody writes those by hand — the same record produces all three.
Where the data comes from
Earthquakes in Indonesia come from BMKG, which is usually first to publish and the only agency reporting felt intensities and shakemaps for the region. Everything outside Indonesia comes from the USGS.
When both agencies report the same rupture, the records are merged into a single page rather than published twice. Two records are treated as the same event when they are less than two minutes and 250 km apart.
BMKG publishes in Indonesian. Descriptive wording is translated — bearings, land or sea, administrative terms — while place names are left exactly as the agency wrote them, the same way the USGS leaves foreign place names alone.
What gets published
Not every earthquake. The planet records thousands of tremors a day and most mean nothing to anyone. The current thresholds are:
- Indonesia — magnitude 4.0 and above
- Worldwide — magnitude 4.0 and above
Feeds are checked every 60 seconds. An earthquake typically appears here two to five minutes after it happens, which is how long the reporting agency takes to publish. No service can be faster than its source.
Time and language
Every time on this site is UTC, and everything is written in English. A worldwide feed that switched language or time zone per event would be harder to compare, not easier.
What to keep in mind
First reports are nearly always automatic and have not been reviewed by an analyst. Magnitude and depth are often revised within the first few hours, and pages are updated when that happens. Where a report is still unreviewed, the page says so.
This is not an early warning system. For evacuation decisions and tsunami warnings, follow your national agency — in Indonesia, BMKG and BNPB. The terms of use set this out in full.
Credits
Earthquake data by the USGS and BMKG, neither of whom endorse or are responsible for this service. Maps use tiles from Esri, drawing on Esri, HERE, Garmin, and OpenStreetMap contributors.
Contact
Corrections, bug reports, and data removal requests go to hello@quakewire.com. Reports of errors in the underlying data belong with the reporting agency, since we only republish what they issue.
The public JSON feed at /api/quakes is open to anyone. Privacy is short: no accounts, no advertising, and nothing about you kept beyond what it takes to deliver an alert you asked for.