USGS + EMSC catalogs · Animated · 3D
Live Earthquake Map
A live, interactive earthquake map that animates recent seismicity on a rotatable 3D globe. Every quake is pulled straight from the USGS and EMSC earthquake catalogs and replayed in the order it actually happened, sized by magnitude and positioned by depth.
What this map shows
Most earthquake maps give you a snapshot: a scatter of dots over a flat projection, everything from the last week piled on top of everything else. This one adds the dimension that snapshot throws away — time — and the one flat maps cannot show at all — depth.
Choose any window, from the last 24 hours to several decades, and the globe plays it back as a sequence. A mainshock appears, then its aftershocks bloom outward around it over the following hours and days. Swarms flicker on and off. Along a subduction zone you can watch activity migrate along strike. None of that is visible in a static plot.
Search controls
- Time range — any start and end date the USGS catalog covers.
- Magnitude window — a minimum and maximum, so you can isolate only the significant events or deliberately include the microseismicity.
- Search area — a centre and a radius in kilometres, or a rectangle bounded by north, south, west and east — drawn on the mini map or typed as coordinates, from a single city out to the whole planet.
Layers you can switch on
- Tectonic plate boundaries — the edges most quakes trace.
- Active fault lines — mapped faults at higher detail.
- Holocene volcanoes — volcanoes active in roughly the last 11,700 years.
- Country borders, US state borders, rivers, lakes and a coordinate grid.
How to read what you are seeing
Each earthquake is drawn as a glowing pulse. Size scales with magnitude, and because magnitude is logarithmic the difference is dramatic on purpose — a magnitude 7 releases roughly 32 times the energy of a magnitude 6, and it should not look like a slightly bigger dot.
Colour is assigned by magnitude band — low (5.0 and under), mid (5.0 to 7.0) and high (7.0 and above) — and each band's colour is adjustable. Turn on depth tinting instead and colour shifts to encode hypocentre depth, which immediately separates the shallow crustal quakes from the deep ones descending inside a slab.
This is not an early-warning system. The map reflects what USGS has already published, which means it is inherently after the fact. For alerts, shaking intensity reports and official hazard information, use the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program.
Where the data comes from
Earthquakes are queried live from the USGS FDSN event web service, the public API behind the USGS earthquake catalog (ComCat), and from the EMSC SeismicPortal event service of the Euro-Mediterranean Seismological Centre (used under CC BY 4.0). ComCat aggregates solutions from the USGS National Earthquake Information Center and the dense regional networks inside the United States, which is why it lists magnitude-1 events in California but mostly magnitude 4.5 and above elsewhere. EMSC pools around 120 national networks — Turkey, Italy, Greece, Indonesia, Chile, Mexico and many more — so it carries far more small earthquakes outside the United States, back to 1998.
The query screen lets you search either catalog or both. When both are used, the same earthquake reported by each is matched by origin time, location and magnitude (the tolerance widens for large ruptures, whose epicentres can legitimately differ by 100 km or more between agencies) and shown once, and hovering a pulse tells you which catalog it came from.
Two things follow from that which are worth knowing. First, early solutions get revised: an event's magnitude, depth and location can all change in the hours after it happens as more stations report and analysts review the automatic pick. Second, catalog completeness varies by region. Dense networks in California, Japan and Alaska record far smaller events than sparse ocean-basin coverage does, so a map of small quakes partly reflects where the seismometers are rather than where the seismicity is.
Common questions
How often is the earthquake map updated?
The map queries the USGS and EMSC earthquake catalogs live each time you run a search, so it returns whatever the agencies have published at that moment. Both typically post automatic solutions within minutes of an event, then revise magnitude and location as analysts review the data.
How many earthquakes happen every day?
Global networks record several thousand earthquakes a day once very small events are included, but the overwhelming majority are too small to be felt. Magnitude 5 and above occurs on the order of a thousand-plus times a year worldwide, while magnitude 7 and above averages roughly 10 to 20 times a year.
Why does the map show earthquakes in places with no faults marked?
Fault datasets only include mapped, studied faults — mostly on land and mostly in well-surveyed regions. A great many earthquakes occur on offshore structures or on faults that have never been mapped at the surface, so quakes routinely appear where no fault line is drawn.