Alternate title

New Zealand earthquake locations and magnitudes

Date (Publication)

2022-05-30

Status

On going

Point of contact

Organisation name	Individual name	Electronic mail address	Role
GNS Science		nshm@gns.cri.nz	Point of contact

Maintenance and update frequency

Daily

Theme

• earthquake

• GeoNet

• New Zealand

• monitoring

• seismology

• geological hazard

• seismic event

Classification

Unclassified

Use constraints

Copyright

Other constraints

(c) Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences Limited

Use limitation

Please see the GeoNet Data Policy at https://www.geonet.org.nz/policy

Language

English

Topic category

• Geoscientific information
• Location

Supplemental Information

Earthquakes in the catalogue prior to the twentieth century are not based on instrumental readings. These have been collated from Māori history and accounts in newspapers, books and diaries. By comparing shaking and damage reports from different towns and settlements, likely epicentres and magnitudes have been assigned. Geological evidence, such as the movement of surface faults or landsliding, can also improve the magnitude estimate, but only the very largest earthquakes leave a fault trace behind. Even once instruments started to be installed in New Zealand after 1884, there were too few of them to comprise a network that allowed earthquakes to be located. It was not until the 1930s that the locations of stations started to form a network, and not until 1942 that it was complete enough to locate some earthquakes with any confidence. Computers were first used in New Zealand to locate earthquake origins and determine magnitudes in 1964.

Distribution format

Name	Version
KML	unknown
CSV	unknown
GML	3.2.1 and 2
QuakeML	unknown
GeoJSON	unknown
CAP	unknown
text	unknown
JSON	unknown

OnLine resource

Protocol	Linkage	Name
WWW:LINK-1.0-http--link	https://www.geonet.org.nz/data/types/eq_catalogue	New Zealand Earthquake Catalogue
WWW:LINK-1.0-http--link	https://www.geonet.org.nz/data/tools/FDSN	Event Service FDSN data
WWW:LINK-1.0-http--link	https://data.gns.cri.nz/online/DigitalDocument?src=128893	Cat_NSHM_magnitudes revised August 22nd
WWW:DOWNLOAD-1.0-http--download	https://huta22.gns.cri.nz/metadata/srv/api/records/daf6b614-9d0a-45e1-8fa6-df8e2afd7d4d/attachments/VariableDescription.docx

Metadata

File identifier

daf6b614-9d0a-45e1-8fa6-df8e2afd7d4d XML

Metadata language

English

Character set

UTF8

Hierarchy level

Dataset

Hierarchy level name

Dataset

Date stamp

2022-08-30T13:42:48

Metadata standard name

ISO 19115:2003/19139

Metadata standard version

1.0

Metadata author

Organisation name	Individual name	Electronic mail address	Role
GNS Science		datamanagement@gns.cri.nz	Point of contact