About ISC-CEL
The ISC Comprehensive Earthquake List (ISC-CEL) is a new, vetted global catalogue of known earthquakes since worldwide instrumental observations began at the turn of the last century (i.e., since 1904). ISC-CEL is available only to parties supporting this project and its content expands the work done to produce the ISC-GEM Global Instrumental Earthquake Catalogue (Storchak et al., 2015) by:
• regularly including events (1 to 4 times a month), two to three months after they occur (ISC-GEM is usually updated once a year to include the last full calendar year reviewed by the ISC, hence remaining between 2 and 3.5 years behind real-time);
• including not just one magnitude value (moment magnitude Mw) but also preferred mb and MS as well as a representative local or regional magnitude;
• listing stated uncertainties of all major focal parameters and magnitudes;
• lowering the cut-off magnitude to magnitude 4.8 (still allowing only high confidence magnitude estimations).
Furthermore, to create the ISC-CEL we exploit features of various ISC datasets besides the ISC-GEM catalogue (i.e., ISC Bulletin, ISC-EHB dataset and ISC Event Bibliography) to provide the most comprehensive and up to date global list of the Earth's seismicity. We also include, when available, source mechanisms, Zobacks’s (1992) regimes, bibliographic event codes (e.g., TOHOKU2011 is the event code for the Mw 9.1 earthquake off the Tohoku coast, Japan, on 11 March 2011) that facilitate the identification of significant events, and loss estimations (currently from the National Geophysical Data Center).
To assist users of the new list, we are providing an on-line interactive tool to explore seismicity features and/or individual events as well as tools to investigate statistical parameters related to seismicity in a given area.
We envisage the ISC-CEL becoming one of the most important inputs for seismic hazard studies in the years to come.
The header of the ISC-CEL is described below:
| Column | Description |
|---|---|
| eventid | event identifier |
| auth_loc | earthquake location author |
| date | earthquake origin date and time |
| lat | latitude of the epicentre |
| lon | longitude of the epicentre |
| smajax | semi-major axis of the error ellipse, km |
| sminax | semi-minor axis of the error ellipse, km |
| strike | azimuth of smajax, decimal degree |
| depth | depth, km |
| depth_unc | depth uncertainty, km |
| mw | Moment magnitude (Kanamori JGR 1977 https://doi.org/10.1029/JB082i020p02981; Hanks and Kanamori, JGR 1979 https://doi.org/10.1029/JB084iB05p02348) |
| mw_unc | Mw uncertainty |
| mw_auth | Mw author from a) the GCMT project https://www.globalcmt.org/, Dziewonski et al., JGR 1981 https://doi.org/10.1029/JB086iB04p02825; Ekström et al., PEPI 2012 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pepi.2012.04.002; b) EVBIB as compiled from the literature search of Lee and Engdahl, PEPI 2015 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pepi.2014.06.004 and Di Giacomo and Storchak, SRL 2022 https://doi.org/10.1785/0220220166; c) other agencies, see Di Giacomo et al., ESSD 2021 http://doi.org/10.5194/essd-13-1957-2021. |
| ms | Surface wave magnitude (Gutenberg, BSSA 1945 https://doi.org/10.1785/BSSA0350010003; Kárník et al., SGG 1962 https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02590040; Vanĕk et al., 1962; Di Giacomo and Storchak, ESSD 2022 http://doi.org/10.5194/essd-14-393-2022) |
| ms_unc | MS uncertainty |
| ms_auth | MS author |
| mb | short-period body-wave magnitude (Engdahl and Gunst, BSSA 1966 https://doi.org/10.1785/BSSA0560020325) |
| mb_unc | mb uncertainty |
| mb_auth | mb author |
| m_reg-loc | Preferred local/regional magnitude (Di Giacomo and Storchak, JOSE 2016 http://doi.org/10.1007/s10950-015-9543-7) |
| m_reg-loc_unc | Preferred local/regional magnitude uncertainty |
| m_reg-loc_auth | Preferred local/regional magnitude author |
| m_reg-loc_type | Preferred local/regional magnitude type |
| mo | Scalar moment |
| fac | Factor of mo, Nm |
| mo_auth | Scalar moment author |
| mpp to mtt | moment tensor components (mpp, mpr, mrr, mrt, mtp, mtp, mtt, e.g., Dziewonski et al., JGR 1981 https://doi.org/10.1029/JB086iB04p02825) |
| str1 | strike of nodal plane #1 |
| dip1 | dip of nodal plane #1 |
| rake1 | rake of nodal plane #1 |
| str2 | strike of nodal plane #2 |
| dip2 | dip of nodal plane #2 |
| rake2 | rake of nodal plane #2 |
| type | type of nodal plane: BDC = best double-couple; BB = broadband analysis; FM = first motion polarities; RA = relative amplitudes; G = geodetic; unknown if null |
| regime | fault regime according to Zoback, JGR 1992 https://doi.org/10.1029/92JB00132: TF = thrust; NF = normal; SS = strike-slip; TF = thrust with strike-slip component; NS = normal with strike-slip component; NC = not classified (odd) |
| mw_proxy | Mw proxy according to Di Giacomo et al. (2015) http://doi.org/10.1016/j.pepi.2014.06.005, listed (if any) only when no direct Mw is available from GCMT or EVBIB |
| mw_proxy_unc | Mw proxy uncertainty |
| loss | Damage in million US dollars. The dollar value listed is the value at the time of the event |
| loss_source | Source of the loss estimation. NGDC = National Geophysical Data Center http://doi.org/10.7289/V5TD9V7K |
| eq_name | Event name as set in the ISC Event Bibliography (Di Giacomo et al., SRL 2014) https://doi.org/10.1785/0220130143 |