Bosco's RockPile

Recorded in Soquel · Regional earthquake

M3.4 earthquake near Tres Pinos, CA, January 15, 2026, recorded in Soquel

68 km (42 miles) from the Soquel seismic station — confirmed against the USGS catalog.

Magnitude (USGS)M3.4
Location (USGS)14 km S of Tres Pinos, CA
Origin timeJanuary 15, 2026 at 6:24 PM PST
2026-01-16 02:24:54 UTC
Distance from Soquel68 km · 42 miles
Peak ground motion at Soquel4,590 counts (raw amplitude — how hard the ground moved here, not the earthquake's size)
StationEQ-1 short-period seismograph, Soquel, Santa Cruz County, California — about six miles from the 1989 Loma Prieta epicenter
VerifyUSGS catalog, ±10 minutes around this origin

What this page is. The station's automated detector flagged a burst of ground motion at this time, and matching it against the USGS ANSS catalog identified it as this earthquake. Magnitude and location are USGS's — a single home station cannot compute them. The one thing measured here is how hard the ground in Soquel moved.

The live helicorder — what the ground is doing right now

This is the same instrument, live. The 24-hour trace below shows current ground motion in Soquel, refreshed every five minutes. January 15, 2026 has scrolled off this window; the recording of that day lives in the station catalog.

Live Helicorder · Seismic Activity ● Live · updates every 5 min
Live 24-hour helicorder trace from the Soquel seismic station
Each horizontal line is 60 minutes of ground motion — time runs left to right, top to bottom. Darker traces mean stronger motion. A 24-hour rolling window recorded by a home station in Soquel, California, refreshed here automatically every five minutes. Click the chart to open it full-size and read the timestamps and traces.