The ISC Electronic Archive of Printed Station / Network Bulletins
In this archive users can find scans of printed seismological bulletins. These were the main source of instrumental parametric data in seismology before the electronic era began. Printed bulletins may contain a single station (e.g., Riverview, Observatorio San Calixto in La Paz) or a set of stations (network, e.g., as in former USSR from the late 1920s).
The bulletins have been scanned from various sources and have been indexed based on the town where each bulletin was produced. Hence, the town (or site, generally speaking) can coincide with the historical station name/location or, as it is often the case, it represents the headquarters of an organization producing the bulletins.
Users can search for bulletin scans by clicking on a town marker in the map below, or on the site list from drop-down menu on the top left of the map. Next, an inventory of the scans available that were produced at that site is shown with the PDF of each scan free to download.
The ISC archive of printed bulletins is not comprehensive. To improve this service, we are keen to host scans provided by the community (email contact: papers
isc.ac.uk).
If you used this service for your work, please use the following citations:
International Seismological Centre (2025), The ISC Electronic Archive of Printed Station/Network Bulletins, https://doi.org/10.31905/GNLY467C
Di Giacomo, D., Olaru, D., Armstrong, A., Harris, J. and Storchak, D. A. (2022). The ISC Electronic Archive of Printed Station and Network Bulletins. Seism. Res. Lett., 93, 2A, 749–752, https://doi.org/10.1785/0220210262
Select a location from the map below by clicking on a town marker: Specify data range( Min: 1879 Max: 2001)
About the printed bulletin sources
The printed bulletins available here were obtained at different stages of the ISC history. Many of them were acquired by the ISC and its predecessor (International Seismological Summary) during several decades of the last century. Additional collections of printed bulletins were donated to the ISC by several colleagues and/or several organizations. For their help, we are grateful to:
- Graziano Ferrari and his team at Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (Italy) for scanning the initial ISC collection;
- We are grateful for some of the scans produced in 2005 by SGA Storia Geofisica Ambiente (Bologna) on behalf of the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (Rome), in the frame of EUROSEISMOS project;
- Roger Musson for sharing with the ISC a collection of station bulletins gathered by him at the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh (UK);
- Xeni Ambraseys for donating to the ISC printed seismic station bulletins from the private collection of her late husband Nick Ambraseys (Imperial College London);
- Aleksey Malovichko, Oleg Starovoit, Irina Gabsatarova, Olga Kamenskaya, Vera Babkina, Raisa Mihailova and Elena Terehova (Geophysical Survey, Russian Academy of Sciences, Obninsk, Russia) for providing digital files and scanned images of the bulletins of the United Backbone Network of Seismic Stations of the Former Soviet Union and individual historical seismic stations of the Russian Empire;
- Michel Cara and Magali Pierrat of EOST of University of Strasbourg in France for helping us fill gaps in the ISC printed bulletin collection;
- Rudolf Widmer-Schnidrig from the Black Forest Observatory, Germany, for shipping many bulletins from the University of Stuttgart archive;
- Josep Batlló from the Institut Cartogràfic i Geològic de Catalunya (ICGC), Spain, for the support given in sourcing several station bulletins in Spain and several other locations worldwide;
- José Manuel Tordesillas García-Lillo and Marina López Muga for kindly providing scans of the backbone stations of the Instituto Geográfico Nacional (IGN) as well as for facilitating the use of the scans available at the IGN website;
- Andrey Fedorov (Kola Regional Seismic Centre, Russia) for providing scans of Apatity station bulletins;
- Johannes Schweitzer from NORSAR for providing several bulletins from the early years of the 20th century;
- Anna Berezina and Kanatbek Abdrahmatov (Institute of Seismology, National Academy of Sciences, Kyrgyzstan) for organizing the scanning of the original operator notepads of the Frunze seismic station;
- Siegfried Wendt (Universitaet Leipzig, Germany) for sending us missing bulletins of the Collm Observatory;
- Jan Zednik?of the Geophysical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague for filling specific gaps in our inventory;
- Bj?rn Lund for sending us bulletins from the archive of the University of Uppsala (Sweden) and for facilitating the use of the scans available at http://www.axelhamberg.se/bulletin/Engelsk.htm;
- Décio Martins and Carlos Fiolhais for raising funds and coordinating the scanning of the IGUC (Geophysical Institute of the University of Coimbra) yearbooks, through FCT project HC/0119/2009;
- Susana Custódio for facilitating the exchange of Portuguese bulletins and the Infante D. Luiz Geophysical Institute - Lisbon, for providing scans as reproduced in 2005 by SGA Storia Geofísica Ambiente (Bologna), on behalf of the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (Rome), in the frame of the EUROSEISMOS project;
- Peter Voss for providing the Disko Island scan;
- Max Suter for providing scans of Mexican bulletins for 1909-1918 and 1920-1934;
- Antonio Villase?or for providing the BCIS scans for 1953-1963.
- Paul Viskovic for providing scans for several years of the New Zealand bulletin reports.
- Luis Rivera for allowing us to include scans already available at EOS Strasbourg Geo-Archive. We are also grateful to Josep Batlló for bringing this archive to our attention.
- Masaki Kanao and Ayuko Ibaraki from the National Institute of Polar Research, Japan, for providing scans of Syowa station.
- Priscilla Roberts from the University of Saint Joseph, Macao, for providing scans of Manila observatory.
- Shane T. Detwiler, Keith L. Knudsen, Lind S. Gee (Earthquake Science Center, U.S. Geological Survey), William L. Ellsworth (Stanford University) and Peggy Hellweg (University of California, Berkeley) for organizing and sending to the ISC the personal collection of bulletins of the late William H.K. Lee.
- Adina R?u and M?r??escu Denisa from The National Institute for Earth Physics - Seismological Observatory of Timisoara, Romania, for providing scans that fill various gaps in our bulletin collection for observatories in Austria, Colombia, Germany, Iceland, Peru, Switzerland, Vietnam and former Yugoslavia.
- Ciarán Beggan and the BGS Geomagnetism team for allowing us to include the scan of the National Antarctic Expedition 1901-1904, which includes the section "Earthquakes Recorded in the Antarctic Regions, 1902-1903" curated by John Milne.
