National Earthquake Information Center

 

National Earthquake Information Center "The mission of the National Earthquake Information Center (NEIC) is to determine rapidly the location and size of all destructive earthquakes worldwide and to immediately disseminate this information to concerned national and international agencies, scientists, and the general public. The NEIC compiles and maintains an extensive, global seismic database on earthquake parameters and their effects that serves as a solid foundation for basic and applied earth science research." The National Earthquake Information Center (NEIC), a part of the Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey, is located in Golden, Colorado, 10 miles west of Denver. The NEIC has three main missions. First, the NEIC determines, as rapidly and as accurately as possible, the location and size of all significant earthquakes that occur worldwide. The NEIC disseminates this information immediately to concerned national and international agencies, scientists, critical facilities, and the general public. Second, the NEIC collects and provides to scientists and to the public an extensive seismic database that serves as a solid foundation for scientific research, principally through the operation of modern digital national and global seismograph networks and through cooperative international agreements.
The NEIC is the national data center and archive for earthquake information. Third, the NEIC pursues an active research program to improve its ability to locate earthquakes and to understand the earthquake mechanism. These efforts are all aimed at mitigating the risks of earthquakes to mankind; and they are made possible by the fine international cooperation that has long characterized the science of seismology. The NEIC operates a 24-hour-a-day service to determine the location and magnitude of significant earthquakes in the United States and around the world as rapidly and accurately as possible. This information is communicated to federal and state government agencies who are responsible for emergency response, to government public information channels, to national and international news media, to scientific groups (including groups planning aftershock studies), and to private citizens who request information. When a damaging earthquake occurs in a foreign country, the earthquake information is passed to the staffs of the American embassies and consulates in the affected countries and to the United Nations Department of Humanitarian Affairs (DHA). The NEIC issues rapid reports for those earthquakes with magnitudes at least 3.0 in the eastern United States, 3.0 in the western United States, or 5.0 (or are known to have caused damage) anywhere else in the world. At the present time, the NEIC staff locates and publishes approximately 30,000 earthquakes on a yearly basis. These are the most important of the many million earthquakes which are estimated to occur each year.
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