Systems · Research platform; not a prediction or warning service
QuakeWatch
Seismic data platform that remembers every revision.
In plain words. A website that tracks earthquakes from public data and keeps a record when the numbers are corrected later. It reports what happened; it does not predict earthquakes.
The problem
Earthquake records are revised after first publication, and feeds go down or repeat entries. A map of current markers hides that history.
What it does
Ingests USGS data, normalises it, keeps canonical events separate from immutable revisions and raw payloads, and supports spatial queries, explainable alert rules, analytics and reproducible exports.
Key decisions
- Ingestion is idempotent, so retries and backfills do not duplicate events or erase corrections.
- Research snapshots pin revisions, so an export can be compared later.
- Django auth data lives in SQLite; all domain data lives in ArangoDB.
- Index benchmarks keep uniqueness constraints fixed so correctness does not change between runs.
Limits and status
- Does not predict earthquakes and is not an emergency system.
- When the upstream feed is down it serves existing data and should show freshness.