Quakes 3D — Live Earthquake Globe

A live window into the planet's seismic pulse

Somewhere on Earth, the ground is moving right now. The USGS records tens of thousands of earthquakes every month, the vast majority far too small to feel. This map pulls that live feed and paints each one onto a 3D globe so you can actually see the shape of it: the Pacific Ring of Fire glowing along the plate boundaries, aftershock clusters lighting up around a big event, and the steady background hum of micro-quakes everywhere else.

How it works

When the page loads it fetches the U.S. Geological Survey's public real-time GeoJSON feed for the window you pick, then renders the planet with WebGL. Each earthquake becomes a glowing point placed at its real latitude, longitude, and time, sized and coloured by magnitude. Hit play and a time-lapse sweeps through the window, so a month of activity plays back in a few seconds and you watch the map fill in event by event. The globe rotates and zooms with your mouse or finger, and clicking any quake shows its magnitude, depth, location, and a link to the full USGS report. The map refreshes itself on a timer, so it stays current while it's open.

Reading the map

Colour and size both track magnitude. Small quakes are little and cool-coloured, blue through green; as magnitude climbs they grow and warm up through yellow and orange to red, and the rare great quakes flare almost white. Depth isn't drawn directly to keep the globe readable, but it's there in the details when you click. The brightest pulsing marker is the single most recent event in the current window.