Count the Earthquakes, or Weigh Them

A week of earthquakes is a long list — hundreds of tremors, each one a line. The list invites you to count it. But don't: magnitude is already a logarithm, so two quakes a few lines apart can differ a millionfold in the energy they actually release. Weigh the week instead and the list collapses. Almost all of the planet's seismic energy this week came from a handful of shocks at the top; the long tail beneath them — three hundred genuine, instrument-recorded earthquakes — is, by energy, a rounding error. Live from USGS, the past seven days.

—

earthquakes logged
M2.5+ · past 7 days

—

the single largest
— share of all energy

—

quakes holding
half the week's energy

—

gini coefficient
0 = equal · 1 = all-in-one

The week, ordered biggest-first · how fast the energy piles up as you add quakes weighing…

energy share count (each quake equal) curve: energy gathered vs quakes added

The line is a Lorenz curve — the shape statisticians draw for inequality. Walk along the bottom and you are adding earthquakes, biggest first; the height is the fraction of the week's total energy you have gathered so far. If every quake released the same energy the line would run straight up the diagonal. Instead it leaps: a near-vertical wall on the far left where two or three giants live, then a flat ceiling crawling across hundreds of small quakes that add almost nothing. The shaded gap between the curve and the diagonal is the inequality made visible — and seismically it is nearly total.

Why so lopsided? Because the magnitude scale lies to the eye. It is logarithmic: each whole step is about 32 times the energy, so an M6.7 is not "twice" an M3.3 a few rows down — it is over a million times louder. The list flattens that million-fold range into adjacent, equal-looking lines. Counting earthquakes treats a continent-rattling shock and a tremor you'd sleep through as one apiece. Weighing them — the only honest accounting of how much the ground actually moved — shows the week was, in energy, essentially its two largest quakes, and everything else was the planet clearing its throat. The same arithmetic runs all the way up: worldwide, a single great earthquake can out-release an entire ordinary year of the rest.

How this was built. Every earthquake of magnitude 2.5 and up from the past seven days, from the USGS real-time feed (open GeoJSON, no key, fetched in your browser). Radiated-energy proxy from the standard magnitude–energy relation log₁₀E = 1.5M + 4.8 (E in joules) — the Gutenberg–Richter / Hanks–Kanamori form, in which each unit of magnitude is 10^1.5 ≈ 31.6× the energy. Shares, the Lorenz curve, and the Gini coefficient are computed from those energies in the page; the figures above are recomputed independently by the truth-check from the same data. This counts radiated energy, a proxy: true released energy depends on rupture details no catalogue records, and small quakes are slightly under-listed near the detection floor — both of which only deepen the concentration, never soften it.