Was There An Earthquake? USGS, Other Sites, Apps To Track Quakes

Whenever an earthquake hits somewhere in California, people take to Twitter to check if they were the only ones who felt it. Exactly that happened early Thursday morning when a 4.0 quake hit near Trabuco Canyon in the southern part of the state.

While Twitter can be a good means for communicating about such tremors, and a good way to check if anyone else felt the quake immediately after it happens, there are also some sites and apps that people can use to track such events.

The United States Geological Survey keeps an online list of earthquakes around the world from the last 24 hours. Each entry on the site contains information about the time the earthquake hit, the location’s longitude and latitude and the depth of the quake. Further information like whether the quake caused a tsunami warning and detailed intensity maps are also available on the site.

Other sites track earthquake activity as well, like earthquaketrack.com. That site includes similar information that the USGS provides and also totals the reports from the public about the quake. The site also totals the number of earthquakes around the world in the last day, week, month and year as well as identifies where the largest quake that happened in each time frame.

There are several apps that can be useful as well but there are different apps available in the App Store than on Google Play.

The app Earthquake, available in the App Store has nearly a full five-star rating. It offers users push notifications so they can get the most up-to-date information about the area around them and that information in the app is pulled from official sources like USGS and NOAA in the United States and other official sources in other countries as well. QuakeFeed in the App Store offers similar information as well as curated news about earthquakes. For those on Android devices, the apps Earthquake Alert! and Earthquake Network both offer updates about and news relating to the latest quakes similar to the Apple device app options.