Terms of Use

These terms cover terrapulse.info and its API. They are written in plain English on purpose. If you read nothing else: the measurements are not ours, the way we organize them is, and you may not bulk-copy this site.

What we claim

TerraPulse owns the copyright in the articles, explanatory text, figures, and page designs published here, and in the selection, coordination, and arrangement of the Dexes. Each Dex is built to a written scope rule that decides what counts, which sources are used, and how records of the same real thing are folded into one entry. That editorial judgment, and the structure it produces, is a compilation protected by copyright.

What we do not claim

We claim no ownership of any measurement. A magnitude, a gauge height, a flash count, or a yield is a fact about the world, recorded by an instrument that belongs to someone else. Facts are not copyrightable, and we would not want them to be: that principle is what lets TerraPulse exist. Every Dex names its sources, and every entry traces back to the instrument that recorded it.

Where a source publishes under a licence that permits reuse, such as Creative Commons Attribution, CC0, or a government public-domain dedication, that licence governs the data, and nothing in these terms adds a restriction to it. The API returns the licence basis for every Dex it serves. Reuse the underlying data on the source's terms, credit the source as its licence requires, and, if you found it here, a link back is appreciated but not required.

What you may do

• Read, search, link to, and cite anything on the site.
• Quote from the articles with attribution, within the limits of fair use or fair dealing.
• Use the API for research, journalism, products, and commercial work.
• Take the underlying measurements to your own project under the source licence named for that Dex.

What you may not do

• Use crawlers, scrapers, or other automated tools to bulk-extract the pages of this site, or to pull from the API at a rate that degrades it for others. Ordinary search-engine indexing that respects robots.txt is fine. So is an API client that fetches what it needs, including all of a Dex whose data is openly licensed, at a reasonable pace.
• Mirror, clone, or republish our arrangement: a Dex or the Dexes together, presented as a substitute for this site or as a competing catalogue. This restricts the organizing and the text, never the measurements. Where a source licence lets you redistribute the data, you may take that data from here in full and build what you like with it, on the source's terms. Rebuilding your own catalogue from the original sources is always allowed.
• Republish our articles, figures, or explanatory text as your own, or strip provenance and source attribution from anything you take.
• Use the site or the API to train a model on our articles and explanatory text without written permission. This does not restrict the measurements, which you may use for anything their source licence allows, model training included.

The licences behind the data, specifically

So there is no doubt about what the carve-outs above cover, this is every licence class currently live on the site. The API returns the exact basis for each Dex.

• United States federal works, the large majority of Dexes: public domain by statute (17 U.S.C. § 105). No restriction of any kind from the source, and none added here.
• Creative Commons Attribution 4.0: the gravitational-wave catalogue (GWOSC), the Kp index (GFZ Potsdam), and the World Bank energy-use and forest-cover series. You may share and adapt this data, commercially included, provided you credit the source, name the licence, and note any changes. We impose nothing beyond that licence, and nothing on this page should be read as doing so.
• CC0 1.0: the Safecast radiation surveys. Dedicated to the public domain by the source. No restriction.
• NASA Space Physics Data Facility archives: the spacecraft field and particle series. Freely available with no use restriction; the archive asks that the mission and investigators be acknowledged.
• Mixed official records: the nuclear-explosion catalogue draws on US federal works, UK Crown documents whose copyright has expired or that are reusable under the Open Government Licence v3.0, and official Russian and French state publications from which only dates, times, places, and energies are taken. Facts are not copyrightable, and we claim none of them.

If a Dex is ever added under a licence that does restrict reuse, its page and its API basis will say so, and that licence, not this page, will govern it.

The API

The API is open today, without keys or metering. It is offered as is. We may add rate limits or keys later; if we issue you a key, using it is your agreement to these terms, and we may revoke a key used to get around them. We may block traffic that behaves like bulk extraction.

No warranty

TerraPulse republishes numbers as received from instruments and the agencies that operate them. We do not correct, model, or forecast. We make no promise that any value is accurate, complete, current, or fit for a purpose, and the site must not be relied on for safety-critical decisions. Warnings and forecasts come from the responsible agency, not from here.

Changes and contact

We may revise these terms. The effective date at the top is the date of the current version, and the site's public history records earlier ones. Questions, permission requests, and reports of misuse go to the team listed on the Team page.