World earthquakes, day by day

How many earthquakes a day?

The Earth shakes all the time: the US Geological Survey catalogue records ten to twenty earthquakes of magnitude 4.5 or more every day, the threshold above which a global network detects them almost completely. The page counts these events day by day and also keeps the strongest magnitude, so that major earthquakes, magnitude 7 and above, stand out at a glance.

The bursts in the curve are aftershocks: after a major earthquake the daily count can exceed a hundred for several days, then decays following a law known since the 19th century. On the full-history view the improvement of the networks since 1973 shows too, as the detection of small magnitudes became complete over the decades.

No established link ties these earthquakes to the Schumann resonance or to solar activity: the page is here to compare, not to suggest.