The unlucky events that took place in Nepal have flooded the web with visualization of the earthquakes from USGS. They normally visualize earthquakes with a colour scale that depends on the age of the event and a marker size that depends on magnitude. I remembered that some time ago I tested ways for downloading and visualizing data from USG in the same way in R. So I decided to take those tests back, clean them up and publish them. I hope this will not offend anyone, I do not want to disrespect the tragedy, just share my work.The USGS provides access to csv files for seismic events recording in several time frames: past hour, past day, past week, and in the past 30 days. For each of these, several choices of significance are provided, user can download all the events in the time frame or limit their request to events with magnitude higher than: 1.0, 2.5, 4.5 and significant events. The data are provided in csv files with standard names so that they are always accessible and updated every 15 minutes with new data.USGS provides the csv files in links with standard names. For example in this case we are downloading all the data in the last month, so the csv file’s name is: all_month.csv. If we wanted to download only the earthquakes in the last day and with a magnitude above 4.5, we would have used the file name: 4.5_day.csv. The links to all the csv provided by USGS are available here: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/feed/v1.0/csv.php For this experiment we need the following packages: sp, plotrix, and rasterIn R we can easily import the data by simply calling the read.table function and reading the csv file from the server:URL