The Kermadec Doublet
This feature has been withdrawn from the public site. It is retained in full in the TerraPulse backend.
Originally published April 2026 · Withdrawn 28 August 2026
Why it was withdrawn
The piece compares where four seismic networks placed the same earthquake. Three of those four — EMSC, GFZ GEOFON and the ISC — license their catalogues for non-commercial use only.
The source in question is EMSC SeismicPortal, GFZ GEOFON and the International Seismological Centre. TerraPulse is a commercial platform, and data licensed for non-commercial use only cannot sit underneath work we publish. Rather than leave it in place and hope, we removed it.
This is not a retraction
The finding is intact: the catalogues genuinely disagreed about the location by tens of kilometres, and USGS's own solution moved 25.8 km between its first and reviewed positions. That disagreement is exactly what makes the piece worth reading, and it is unaffected by the licence question.
What would bring it back
- Rebuild the comparison from catalogues that permit commercial use, or obtain commercial terms from EMSC, GFZ and the ISC.
- If no replacement exists, the piece can only be republished as a USGS-internal comparison — first solution versus reviewed solution — which is a narrower claim and needs a rewritten headline.
TerraPulse ingests measured data only, and publishes only what it can publish cleanly. Withdrawing work we had already shipped is the cost of that rule, and we would rather pay it visibly than quietly.