Shaking Up the South Pacific

1,000 seismic events near Fiji, mapped with Leaflet

Published: September 03, 2026

What am I looking at?

R ships with a built-in dataset, quakes, recording 1,000 seismic events near Fiji: their location, depth, magnitude, and how many seismic stations detected them. Instead of a table of numbers, here they are on an actual map — pan and zoom around, click a marker for details, or toggle the different magnitude tiers on and off.

A few things worth noticing

• Bigger, redder circles are stronger earthquakes — bubble size and color both scale with magnitude, so patterns jump out even before you start clicking around.
• Use the box in the top-right to hide or show a magnitude tier — try turning off everything except Strong to see where the biggest quakes cluster.
• Most events sit along a clear band — that’s the Tonga-Kermadec subduction zone, one of the most seismically active boundaries on Earth.

About this dataset

quakes is bundled with base R (originally from Harvard PARI, via the Fiji seismic network) — no download or API key required, which makes it a convenient, fully reproducible dataset for a demo like this one.