Earthquakes Detected in Soquel, California, Confirmed by USGS

The live helicorder shows the ground moving right now. This page shows what that motion has been — the earthquakes this home station actually caught. Over roughly 43 weeks of recording, the EQ-1's automated detector flagged 176,272 bursts of ground motion. Matching their timing against the USGS earthquake catalog confirms 282 of them as real earthquakes — a homemade instrument in a Soquel basement reading the pulse of the whole Pacific.

The strongest, the closest, the farthest

The single strongest arrival the station recorded was the M4.2 near San Ramon, CA on Feb 2 — close enough (84 km) and large enough to tower over everything else on the chart. The closest was a M4.6 near Boulder Creek, CA, just 20 km away; the farthest was a M7.1 at Kota Belud, Malaysia — 12,256 km, its deep waves still detectable under Soquel.

June 24, 2026 was the standout day: within about seven hours the station logged the local M5.6 Redwood Valley shock, the M7.2 and M7.5 Venezuela doublet, and a M6.9 off Japan — four confirmed earthquakes across three continents, all on one afternoon's trace.

How this was made & what it isn't. Events were found with an automated STA/LTA trigger on the EQ-1's records (0.7–8 Hz band), then confirmed by matching arrival times to the USGS ANSS catalog. Two honest caveats: the amplitude axis is raw ground-motion counts, not magnitude — a single station can't compute magnitude, so the magnitudes shown are USGS's. And the daily detection totals include ordinary cultural noise (traffic, footsteps, doors), not only earthquakes. This is a hobbyist station's honest record, not a calibrated observatory feed.

The continuous record — seven months of ground motion

The catalog above is the events. This is the baseline: every hour of ground motion the EQ-1 recorded from December 5, 2025 to July 15, 2026 — 4,434 hourly readings, plotted as RMS amplitude on a log scale. You can read the daily rhythm of cultural noise, the quiet stretches, and the sharp spikes where real earthquakes and instrument transients punched through.

This is a fixed release covering those seven months. The event catalog above refreshes with the station feed; this baseline does not, and the files below are the Dec 2025 – Jul 2026 block as published.

The record. The full hourly time series is available as a clean CSV, with a machine-readable station-metadata file (station, channel, coordinates, sample rate, coverage).

Hourly ground-motion CSV (4,434 rows)  ·  Station metadata (JSON)
Magnitudes are shown to one decimal above but kept at full published precision in the CSV files — USGS reports magnitude at different precision by network and magnitude type (M3.42 from one, M3.9 from another), and the downloads preserve what was published.

Where this is going

This catalog now refreshes every month on a rolling window — the station's detections re-run against the latest USGS record and the chart and table above rebuild automatically. The plan is to keep widening the window toward the full multi-year archive and to add searchable, groupable event tables (by magnitude, distance, region, and date) so students, hobbyists, and researchers can explore what a single backyard seismometer in Santa Cruz County has felt over its lifetime. If that's useful to you, get in touch.

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