How EarthPulse Works

Earthquakes

• 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 when USGS reports one.

Wildfires

• 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".
• Refresh: cached and re-fetched roughly every 12 minutes.

Volcanoes

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

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

EarthPulse is informational and educational. It 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.