How EarthPulse Works

Earthquake data — USGS

• Source: USGS Earthquake Hazards Program
• Threshold: M4.5+ only — smaller tremors aren't shown.
• Coverage: roughly the last seven days of qualifying events.
• Refresh: cached and re-fetched roughly every 5 minutes.
• Each event includes magnitude, depth, location and a tsunami flag, plus — where USGS reports them — felt reports, community-reported and instrumentally estimated shaking intensity, and PAGER alert metadata.

Wildfire data — NASA EONET

• Source: NASA EONET (Earth Observatory Natural Event Tracker) — a curated catalog of notable events, not a complete count of every fire on Earth.
• Filtering: only events with an observation in the last 7 days are shown, so EONET's long-open records (some span years) don't look permanently "live".
• Each event preserves its full dated observation history — first and latest observation, how many observations exist, and every underlying source EONET attributes it to (e.g. InciWeb) alongside NASA EONET itself.
• Refresh: cached and re-fetched roughly every 12 minutes.

Volcano event data — NASA EONET

Volcanic activity comes from the same NASA EONET feed, filtered to its volcano category and the same 7-day recency window as wildfires. EONET alone decides which volcanic events EarthPulse currently shows — EarthPulse doesn't attempt to list every currently-active volcano worldwide, only what EONET has logged an observation for recently.

Volcano context — Smithsonian GVP

• Source: Smithsonian Global Volcanism Program — reference context (type, elevation, country, region, eruption history) for volcanoes EarthPulse can confidently match.
• Matching is conservative and exact, not a best guess: EONET itself references the Smithsonian volcano's exact ID number for most events, and EarthPulse only attaches context when that reference is present. No name-or-location fuzzy matching is used — a wrong match would be worse than no match.
• A volcano missing Smithsonian context doesn't mean it doesn't exist in their database — only that this particular EONET event didn't carry an exact reference to it.
• Refresh: cached for 24 hours — this reference data doesn't need a five-minute cadence.

Data freshness

EarthPulse never queries USGS or NASA on every single page view. Responses are cached server-side and reused until their TTL expires, then re-fetched in the background. The "Updated… ago" label on the homepage reflects the real time of the last successful upstream fetch, not the moment the page was rendered.

Limitations

• NASA EONET is curated event data, not an exhaustive real-time census.
• An EONET observation history ("tracked for") is not necessarily the full physical duration of a wildfire or eruption.
• Smithsonian volcano matching is deliberately conservative — some real matches may be missed rather than risk a wrong one.
• Missing Smithsonian enrichment does not mean a volcano doesn't exist in their database.
• EarthPulse is not an emergency-warning system — follow official local guidance in a real emergency. It does not claim complete global disaster coverage, and it should not replace official sources or local authorities.