United States Geological Survey

Force in Play

Providing independent earthquake measurements

Taiwan got hit with back-to-back earthquakes this week—a 6.0-magnitude tremor on Christmas Day, and a 6.6-magnitude quake Saturday night. Saturday's quake shook buildings across Taipei, damaged Taoyuan Airport's ceiling, and cut power to thousands. Taiwan sits on the collision zone where the Philippine Sea plate rams into the Eurasian plate at 7 centimeters per year, producing roughly 2,200 earthquakes annually.

Updated 2 minutes ago

New Capabilities

Running airborne eDNA pilots for invasive-species detection

For most of conservation history, counting wildlife meant walking into a forest with binoculars, traps, or camera arrays. A new method does the work without ever seeing the animal: filter the air, sequence the DNA fragments floating in it, and read off which species were nearby. By April 2026, the technique has detected 120 vertebrate species in a Zambian savanna in four days, recovered three decades of biodiversity change from a Swedish Cold War nuclear-monitoring archive, and — in a June 2025 first — used an existing national air-quality monitoring network to identify over 1,100 taxa across vertebrates, invertebrates, fungi, and plants in a single country-wide survey.

Updated Apr 26