Most Significant Earthquakes of 2025
About This Dataset
Most Significant Earthquakes of 2025
What this chart shows: the 15 earthquakes of 2025 with the highest significance score in the U.S. Geological Survey's catalogue. Each label gives the place, the date (UTC) and the magnitude.
How the data is collected: USGS assigns every event in its ANSS Comprehensive Earthquake Catalog a "sig" value. Its documentation describes it as a number showing how significant the event is, where larger numbers mean a more significant event, determined from factors including magnitude, maximum intensity, felt reports and estimated impact. USGS gives a typical range of 0 to 1,000; the highest-ranked earthquakes of 2025 scored well above that.
Background: USGS's PAGER system estimates fatalities and economic losses after significant earthquakes and assigns an alert level of green, yellow, orange or red; its FAQ says that historically this works out to about 15 yellow, 1-2 orange and 1-2 red alerts a year. Because the score takes felt reports and estimated impact into account as well as magnitude, a smaller earthquake can score higher than a larger one.
Limits: the significance score is a USGS index, not a count of casualties or damage, and USGS does not publish the exact formula in its catalogue documentation. Scores can change as felt reports and impact estimates are updated; these are the values as of September 2026.
How the data is collected: USGS assigns every event in its ANSS Comprehensive Earthquake Catalog a "sig" value. Its documentation describes it as a number showing how significant the event is, where larger numbers mean a more significant event, determined from factors including magnitude, maximum intensity, felt reports and estimated impact. USGS gives a typical range of 0 to 1,000; the highest-ranked earthquakes of 2025 scored well above that.
Background: USGS's PAGER system estimates fatalities and economic losses after significant earthquakes and assigns an alert level of green, yellow, orange or red; its FAQ says that historically this works out to about 15 yellow, 1-2 orange and 1-2 red alerts a year. Because the score takes felt reports and estimated impact into account as well as magnitude, a smaller earthquake can score higher than a larger one.
Limits: the significance score is a USGS index, not a count of casualties or damage, and USGS does not publish the exact formula in its catalogue documentation. Scores can change as felt reports and impact estimates are updated; these are the values as of September 2026.
Analysis
The most significant earthquake of 2025 in USGS's catalogue was the magnitude 7.7 Mandalay, Burma (Myanmar) earthquake on 28 March, with a score of 2,910. It was followed by the Southern Tibetan Plateau earthquake (M7.1, 2,787). 8 of the top 15 were below magnitude 7. The magnitude 6.0 earthquake in Afghanistan on 31 August scored 2,149, higher than the magnitude 8.8 Kamchatka earthquake, and a second Afghan earthquake of magnitude 5.6 scored 2,066. 7 of the 15 received a red PAGER alert. The Kamchatka earthquake, the largest of the year by magnitude, ranks 4th with 2,114.
Key Findings
🏆
Mandalay, Burma (Myanmar) (28 Mar) M7.7 leads in USGS significance score with 2,910 in 2025.
📊
Average USGS significance score in 2025: 1,786 · median: 1,684.
↔️
Gap in 2025: Mandalay, Burma (Myanmar) (28 Mar) M7.7 is 2.5× larger than 12 km E of Santiago, Philippines (10 Oct) M7.4.
Data Insights
Numbers, trends & sources behind this chart
Methodology & source
- Data source
- U.S. Geological Survey, ANSS Comprehensive Earthquake Catalog (ComCat)
- Coverage
- 15 entities · 2025 · 15 observations
- Measure
- USGS significance score
- Last updated
- 16 September 2026
- Compiled by
- The ANYSTAT team, from the source above
How the figures are calculated
- Values are shown as reported by the source. Nothing is rescaled, rebased or converted — the only changes are thousand separators and decimals shown to two places.
- Entities are ranked highest-first on their value in 2025.
An article using this data
The Biggest Earthquake of 2025 Was Magnitude 8.8. It Was Not the Most Significant.
USGS ranks earthquakes three different ways: by magnitude, by a significance score that includes impact, and by how many people report feeling them. For 2025 th...
Data Sources & References
All external sources cited in this dataset
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