xquantize/global-earthquakes-2020-2026

Dataset Card for Global Earthquakes (2020–2026)

Overview

This dataset contains 11,808 verified global earthquakes (Magnitude 5.0+) recorded between January 1, 2020, and July 15, 2026. Sourced directly from the official USGS FDSN Event Web Service API, every event in this catalog has been human-reviewed by USGS seismologists—eliminating unverified automated detections.

• Total Records: 11,808 confirmed events
• Temporal Range: 2020-01-01 to 2026-07-15
• Magnitude Threshold: $M \ge 5.0$
• Source: USGS Earthquake Hazards Program API (Public Domain)

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Data Cleaning & Quality Control

Raw API pulls often contain duplicate records, calibration blasts, or non-tectonic events. Rather than silently dropping rows, the cleaning methodology is fully documented below:

1. Non-Tectonic Event Removal:
   • The raw pull yielded 11,811 initial records.
   • 1 landslide and 1 volcanic eruption were explicitly filtered out, leaving 11,809 confirmed seismic events.
2. Duplicate Resolution:
   • Multi-network catalog merging resulted in one duplicate entry sharing an identical timestamp, coordinates, and magnitude under two distinct USGS IDs.
   • The duplicate was removed, resulting in zero duplicate IDs across the final 11,808 rows.
3. Preservation of Network Metadata:
   • Columns like nst, gap, dmin, rms, horizontalError, depthError, and magError are preserved with their original null values (up to 36% null for nst).
   • Rationale: These nulls reflect regional seismic network monitoring gaps rather than data errors. Imputing or dropping them would artificially bias models toward heavily monitored areas (e.g., the US and Japan) while underrepresenting remote oceanic or polar regions.
4. Magnitude Scale Transparency:
   • Events utilize standard USGS magnitude types (mww, mb, mwr, mw, ml, etc.) depending on event size and instrumentation. These scales are retained intact in the magType column for precise seismological analysis.

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Schema Reference

Column Name	Data Type	Description
id	String	USGS unique event identifier
time	DateTime (UTC)	Precise timestamp of the earthquake
year	Integer	Extracted year bucket
decade	Integer	Extracted decade bucket
latitude	Float	Epicenter latitude in decimal degrees
longitude	Float	Epicenter longitude in decimal degrees
depth	Float	Hypocenter depth in kilometers ($0 - 676\text{ km}$)
mag	Float	Event magnitude ($5.0 \text{ to } 8.8$)
magType	String	Magnitude scale used (mww, mb, ml, etc.)
place	String	USGS human-readable location description

(Note: Additional regional, category, and error metrics are included in the full 21-column CSV).

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