User:Mikenorton/Earthquake catalogue

Earthquake catalogues summarise information about past earthquakes. The catalogues normally include at a minimum: date and time, epicentral location and an estimate of magnitude and/or maximum felt intensity. Other parameters sometimes recorded are: hypocentral depth, focal mechanism, number of casualties, economic impact, sources used in the compilation of the catalogue, associated tsunami. Most modern catalogues are available online and searchable or at least downloadable as a spreadsheet.

Global catalogues

There are several historical earthquake catalogues that list earthquakes globally, such as those produced by Robert Mallet (1858) and John Milne (1912). More recent catalogues include that compiled by Dr. Tokuji Utsu in Tokyo in 1990, now maintained by the International Institute of Seismology and Earthquake Engineering of the Building Research Institute in Japan. It is now a searchable online catalogue covering the period from 3,000 BC to 2013 inclusive. In 1992 Paula Dunbar and her colleagues at the National Geophysical Data Center produced the first version of the "Catalog of significant earthquakes, including quantitative casualties and damage". The current searchable online catalogue is known as the "Global Significant Earthquake Database, 2150 B.C. to present" and is maintained by the National Centers for Environmental Information.

From about 1900 onwards there are instrumentally records for most earthquakes. The Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS) produces the ANSS Comprehensive Catalog (ComCat), which is available using an online search and the related PAGER-CAT, which details the impact of earthquakes, version 2 of which is currently available for download. The International Seismological Centre produces the ISC-GEM catalogue, available for download, which, in its version 6.0 released in 2019, contains reviewed and, where appropriate, recalculated parameters for earthquakes in the period 1904–2015 inclusive. The ISC also maintains a searchable online event catalogue that retrieves information on earthquakes from 1904 to present, taken from the ISC bulletins. Information is generally available on a new earthquake within about 24 hours.

Country catalogues

Many countries maintain catalogues for past earthquakes that have either had an epicentre located in the country or other earthquakes that have had a significant impact in the country. Other catalogues are maintained by institutes or universities covering either their own country or several countries within a region, such as the CERESIS catalogue, which covers the whole of South America. The CFTI5MED catalogue, maintained by the Italian Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV), provides information on historical earthquakes in Italy from BC 461 to 1997 and for the Mediterranean area from BC 760 to 1500.