V
VESPER
Antofagasta, Chile
The earthquake registry · Pre-launch
Earthquakes don't havenames.We're giving them one.
Hurricanes get names. Cyclones get names. Even winter storms get names. Earthquakes get a date and a number — forgotten by Friday. We're building the public registry that finally lets people recognize, remember, and prepare for the events that shape their lives.
- Quakes ≥ M4.5 / year
- ~13,000
- Proceeds → disaster relief
- 50%
- Naming model
- Open + free
- Launch window
- 2026 · Phase 1
Why names matter
We named hurricanes seventy years ago. The world got better at remembering them.
Before 1953, hurricanes were a date and a number. After: Carla, Andrew, Katrina, Maria. People remember them — across decades, across languages. Memory drives preparation. Preparation saves lives. Earthquakes are the only major natural disaster we still leave nameless.
73yrs
since the WMO began formally naming hurricanes — every one since is part of the public record by name.
WMO Resolution, 1953
12%
of people surveyed can recall the date of the last M6+ earthquake in their country. 71% can name a hurricane that hit a country they've never lived in.
Internal panel survey · n=1,200 · 2025
M1.5
people displaced annually by seismic events. The ones we forget by Friday are also the ones we never get around to building for.
IDMC GRID, 5-yr avg
Names are how memory survives the news cycle. We're building the registry that makes them durable.
What a named quake looks like
Anatomy of a registry entry.
Every entry in the Quake Name registry is the same shape: a permanent ID, a memorable name, a magnitude, a place, and a one-sentence character that helps a name stick. Built to be cited by journalists, scientists, and emergency managers without ambiguity.
REGISTRY IDREG · 2026008
LANDMARKTŌRYŪ
M7.4"Climbed the dragon's spine — long, shallow, persistent."
- A
Permanent registry ID
Seven-digit, year-prefixed, never reused. The citation primary key — for papers, dashboards, news copy.
- B
Public name
Drawn from a regional, culturally-vetted pool. Pronounceable across major languages. Never a person's name; never a place that already exists.
- C
One-line character
A short sentence that captures the event's signature — what made it itself. The phrase journalists actually quote.
- D
Tier + magnitude
Standard Mw alongside a Felt Tier (I–V) that translates the technical scale into how widely it was experienced.
Selected entries
The first batch the registry will catalog.
A working sample. Six events the editorial team has drafted entries for — three retro-cataloged from history, three from the current cycle. Names are illustrative and pending the open naming-spec review.
The one that taught a young city what its ground was made of. 60 seconds; the next century of building code.
The largest earthquake ever recorded. Still the high-water mark of the seismograph era. Naming it after the city honors the people who lived through it.
Held the country still for six minutes. The first quake with a global second-by-second feed; the moment seismology became a livestream.
Hit at twilight. Knocked the lights out across the Atacama for forty minutes; the desert came back lit only by stars and headlamps.
Long, shallow, persistent — the rupture climbed the slab like a dragon's spine. Tsunami advisory cleared in four hours; the name will outlast the news.
Deep, sharp, brief — felt across Crete and southern Anatolia in the same minute. A reminder that the Aegean is still alive.
The path forward
From a concept to a registry the world cites.
We're not asking institutions to adopt anything yet. We're building the spec, the catalog, and the first wave of partner publications, so the registry exists as a credible reference before anyone has to decide whether to use it.
2026 · Q1 – Q2IN PROGRESS Open naming spec
A public, versioned specification for how names are drawn — regional pools, cultural review, year-by-year alphabetical sequencing, magnitude tier. Drafted in the open with seismologists, linguists, and emergency-comms editors.
2026 · Q2 – Q3UP NEXT Retro-catalog
Name every M7.0+ earthquake on record back to 1900. Publish each entry as a permanent registry record — name, magnitude, region, one-line character, citation. The corpus that proves the system works before it's asked to name anything live.
2026 · Q4PENDING Live registry · Phase 1
Open the public registry to live events. Every catalogued earthquake at M5.5+ gets a name within 6 hours. Free API, freely cited. Partner newsrooms pilot using names in standing copy.
2027 +PENDING Adoption
Work with national meteorological and seismological agencies, news wires, and emergency management offices to fold registry names into standing communication — the way hurricane names quietly became default in the 1960s.
Our commitment
50%of all proceeds go to disaster relief.
Quake Name is a registry, not a product company. Half of every dollar the project brings in — partnerships, sponsored data tiers, the eventual licensed-corpus revenue — is routed to disaster-relief organizations working in the regions our entries name. We picked 50% because we wanted a number we'd never have to explain.
Rapid response
Funding the first 72 hours after a named event — search, medical, temporary shelter — through vetted partner orgs already on the ground.
Housing + rebuild
Longer-term reconstruction grants directed to the communities hit by the events the registry names — not to administrators, not to overhead.
Resilience + retrofit
Building-code retrofit work in vulnerable regions: schools, hospitals, low-income housing. The quakes you can name are the ones you should be ready for.
Early-warning infra
Sensor-network funding in under-instrumented zones, so the next named event is one we saw coming — not one we only learned to name in retrospect.
Distribution audited annually · partners and grants public
Pre-launch
Help us name what shapes us.
Whether you're a seismologist, a newsroom, an emergency manager, or someone who's lived through a quake nobody else remembers — we want you on the waitlist before we name a single live event.