The ISC Mandate The International Seismological Centre (ISC) was set up in 1964 with the assistance of UNESCO as a successor to the International Seismological Summary (ISS) to carry forward the pioneering work of Prof. John Milne, Sir Harold Jeffreys and other British scientists in collecting, archiving and processing seismic station and network bulletins and preparing and distributing the definitive summary of world seismicity. Under the umbrella of the International Association of Seismology and Physics of the Earth Interior (IASPEI/IUGG), the ISC has played an important role in setting international standards such as the International Seismic Bulletin Format (ISF), the IASPEI Standard Seismic Phase List (SSPL) and both the old and New IASPEI Manual of the Seismological Observatory Practice (NMSOP-2). The current mission of the ISC is to maintain: • the ISC Bulletin – the longest continuous definitive summary of World seismicity (collaborating with 130 seismic networks and data centres around the world). • the International Seismographic Station Registry (IR, jointly with the World Data Center for Seismology, Denver). • the IASPEI Reference Event List (Ground Truth, GT, jointly with IASPEI). These are fundamentally important tasks. Bulletin data produced, archived and distributed by the ISC for almost 50 years are the definitive source of such information and are used by thousands of seismologists worldwide for seismic hazard estimation, for tectonic studies and for regional and global imaging of the Earth’s structure. The ISC Bulletin contains over 8 million seismic events: earthquakes, chemical and nuclear explosions, mine blasts and mining induced events. The ISC Bulletin contains approximately 255 million individual seismic station readings of arrival times, amplitudes, periods, SNR, slowness and azimuth, reported by approximately 19,000 seismic stations currently registered in the IR.
