Public data
Earthquakes
A free connector serving the USGS real-time earthquake feeds — magnitude, depth, and location — as SQL tables you can filter and join.
Overview
What Earthquakes does
The Earthquakes connector exposes the USGS earthquake GeoJSON feeds as a queryable catalog. Recent events become rows with magnitude, depth, place, and coordinates, refreshed on the USGS cadence.
It is free to attach and pairs naturally with the Volcanos connector and other geospatial public data. Great for live dashboards, alerting prototypes, and learning the Orchard workflow.
Highlights
- USGS real-time feeds (hour / day / week)
- Magnitude, depth, and place columns
- Latitude / longitude for geospatial joins
- Refreshed on the USGS cadence
- No token required — free to attach
Attach & query
-- Attach the free Earthquakes connector (no token required)
ATTACH 'earthquakes' AS quakes (
TYPE vgi,
LOCATION 'https://orchard.query.farm/earthquakes'
);
-- Significant quakes in the last day, strongest first
SELECT place, mag, depth_km, time
FROM quakes.usgs.events
WHERE mag >= 4.5
AND time > now() - INTERVAL 1 DAY
ORDER BY mag DESC;
Requires the VGI extension. Set ORCHARD_TOKEN after subscribing.
What you get
Tables & functions it exposes
Once attached, the connector adds these objects to your SQL session.
usgs.events Recent earthquake events with magnitude and location.
feed(window) Pull a specific USGS feed window (hour, day, week).
Use cases
What teams build with Earthquakes
Build a live “recent quakes” dashboard for free.
Join quakes against volcanoes or population data.
Prototype magnitude-threshold alerting with SQL.
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Ready to attach Earthquakes?
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