USGS catalog · 2025 · M4.5+
A quake map is
the top face
of a solid.
Every map you have seen of this data is drawn flat, because paper and screens are flat. It shows you where. It cannot show you the dimension the events actually differ in most, which is how far down.
Scroll is the only way down
0 – 35 km
Almost all of it is skin
5,316 of the year’s 8,556 events — 62.1% — sit in the top 35 kilometres. On a globe 6,371 km in radius that is a film half a percent thick. This band is what a flat map is really showing you, and it is why one looks so much like another.
35 – 300 km
Then it thins out fast
1,626 events between 35 and 70 km. 1,328 more from there down to 300. The scatter stops being a sheet and starts being a set of ramps — each one a slab of ocean floor going down under something else, lit up along its length.
300 – 700 km
Below 300 km, almost nothing
286 events in the whole year. 200 of them below 500 km. At this depth the rock is too hot and under too much pressure to snap the way it does at the surface, and yet it does — which is a problem seismology has not finished arguing about.
669.6 km
The floor of the year
- Depth
- 669.6 km
- Magnitude
- 4.8
- Where
- 205 km ESE of Levuka, Fiji
- When
- 29 October 2025, 17:07 UTC
The deepest earthquake recorded anywhere in 2025. Nothing in the catalog goes below it. Under Fiji and Tonga the descending slab reaches further than anywhere else on the planet, which is why the deepest events of almost every year are found within a few hundred kilometres of here.
The inversion
Depth is not size
Deepest of 2025
669.6km
magnitude 4.8
205 km ESE of Levuka, Fiji
Largest of 2025
35.0km
magnitude 8.8
Kamchatka Peninsula, Russia
The biggest earthquake of the year happened in the skin. The deepest was one you would not have felt standing on top of it. The two dimensions are close to unrelated, and the flat map — which encodes magnitude as circle size and depth as nothing at all — quietly suggests otherwise.
The distribution
All 8,556, by band
- 0 – 35 km 5,316 62.1%
- 35 – 70 km 1,626 19.0%
- 70 – 300 km 1,328 15.5%
- 300 – 700 km 286 3.3%
The scene above plots every one of those events at its own depth. It is not a sample and it is not smoothed — it is the catalog, packed to 59,900 bytes at seven bytes an event, which is less than one photograph.
Colophon
Where this came from
- Data
- USGS Earthquake Catalog,
fdsnws event/1/query - Query
starttime=2025-01-01 endtime=2026-01-01 minmagnitude=4.5- Events
- 8,556 after dropping non-earthquake and above-sea-level rows
- Retrieved
- 28 July 2026
- Rights
- USGS data are in the public domain
- Projection
- equirectangular, vertical exaggeration ×15
- Type
- system stacks only — this page loads no webfont
The vertical scale is stretched fifteen times. At true proportion the whole 670 km would be a hairline under the map and you would see nothing, which is precisely the problem this page is about — so the exaggeration is stated rather than hidden.
Read the method →