Compare Disaster History by Country

Choose two countries to compare the earthquakes recorded in each, year by year, from 1976 to 2025, using the US Geological Survey's global catalog.

China and India: magnitude 5 or more

The USGS catalog holds 1,094 earthquakes of magnitude 5 or more located in China from 1976 to 2025; the busiest year was 2008, with 105.

The USGS catalog holds 947 earthquakes of magnitude 5 or more located in India from 1976 to 2025; the busiest year was 2004, with 135.

China India

Download these yearly counts (CSV)

By decade

The largest recorded in each

How the counts are made

The numbers are earthquakes of magnitude 5 or more in the USGS Comprehensive Earthquake Catalog for complete calendar years. USGS does not record a country for an earthquake; it describes where each one was, such as "25 km ENE of Jalalabad, Afghanistan". An earthquake is counted for a country when that description names it — including "off the coast of" it and "the country region" — or, for the United States, a state. Earthquakes described only by an ocean, a ridge, a sea or a region that is not a country are not given to any country: 23% of the 83,468 earthquakes in these years were left unassigned that way, most of them at sea.

At magnitude 5 and above the global catalog is far more complete than for smaller earthquakes, but its early years still hold fewer than were detected later, so a rise over the decades can be partly better recording.

This is a count of recorded earthquakes, not a ranking of risk. A larger country has more ground for earthquakes to happen under, most magnitude 5 earthquakes cause little or no damage, and a quiet record says nothing certain about the next year. For impacts, see the historical disasters database.

Counts built 13 Sep 2026 from the USGS event web service. Chart: Apache ECharts (Apache License 2.0).