October 04, 2026
The Week's Biggest Quake Almost Nobody Felt
USGS Community Internet Intensity Map ("Did You Feel It?" responses) for the Sept 29, 2026 Washington quake
The Week's Biggest Quake Almost Nobody Felt
Every week the instruments have a story to tell, and this week's story is about the strange relationship between a quake's size and whether anyone notices it.
The week's largest: M5.9 off Indonesia
Saturday evening (6:55 PM EDT), the instruments logged the week's largest event: a magnitude 5.9, 39 km southwest of Tambolaka, Indonesia, at about 46 km depth. The USGS PAGER system rated it green — no expected casualties, no tsunami. Only a handful of "felt" reports came in, because the epicenter was far offshore. Big number, quiet outcome.
The most-felt: M4.2 in Washington state
The quake the most people actually felt was the modest one. On Tuesday, Sept 29 (5:05 PM EDT), a magnitude 4.2 struck 6 km west-northwest of Wauna, Washington, at about 28 km depth — right under the Puget Sound region. 9,549 people reported feeling it: the week's most-felt event by a wide margin, with light shaking (intensity IV) across Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia.
The map above is the USGS Community Internet Intensity Map for that event — 9,549 responses plotted across 219 ZIP codes. The red star is the epicenter; the blue shading is where people felt the light shaking.
Elsewhere on the planet
- M5.5, Volcano Islands (Japan region) — early this morning, remote and uninhabited; unfelt.
- M5.3, 81 km SSW of Banda Aceh, Indonesia — Saturday evening; green alert.
- M4.7, near Korumburra, Australia — Friday; the small number belies the strength: at just 10 km depth and 5 km from town, shaking reports reached intensity VI, felt by 517 people.
The tally
313 earthquakes of magnitude 2.5+ in seven days; 126 of them magnitude 4.5 or stronger. No M6+ anywhere on the planet this week. That's the Earth being the Earth — ringing like a bell, constantly, mostly where nobody is standing.
This is a roundup of public instrument readings — observation, not prediction. We don't forecast earthquakes, and nobody can. Source: public USGS-tracked earthquake feeds, week ending October 4, 2026.
Source: USGS-tracked public earthquake feeds (week ending Oct 4, 2026) — read the original report
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