Live Earth
Earthquakes around the world as they happen, with each quake's real seismic waves travelling around and through the planet.
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Controls
Time range
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Every magnitude 5+ earthquake in the USGS catalogue. Turn on plate boundaries to see the plates emerge.
Legend
Depth
- 0–35 km
- 35–70 km
- 70–150 km
- 150–300 km
- 300+ km
Magnitude
- M3
- M5
- M7
Newer quakes are brighter; ones from the last hour pulse when they appear.
Waves
- P-wave: fastest, a push-pull pulse
- S-wave: slower, a side-to-side shake
- Surface waves: slowest and strongest
Strongest in this time range
Inside the Earth
Pick an earthquake to send its waves through the planet.
S-waves can't pass through the liquid outer core, which is how we know it's liquid.
How it works
Method
Earthquakes come live from USGS and refresh every minute. Pick one and its waves spread from the epicentre: each front sits where the real wave would be at that moment, using arrival times from a standard Earth model. The cutaway slices the planet open to show the same waves curving through the interior, and Replay plays back years of the catalogue so the plate boundaries show up in the data.
Data
USGS real-time feeds (magnitude 2.5 and up, for the past day, week or 30 days) and the USGS catalogue for replays (magnitude 5 and up), read directly by your browser. Earth imagery from NASA's Blue Marble and Black Marble. Plate boundaries from Bird (2003).
Model
P- and S-wave arrival times come from the iasp91 Earth model, precomputed with ObsPy's TauP for depths of 0 to 700 km at every degree of distance; the same model gives the shadow zones and the curved paths in the cutaway. Surface waves travel at 3.6 km/s, a typical Rayleigh-wave speed. Wave strength fades with distance on a simple attenuation curve (spreading plus absorption, scaled by magnitude): it shows how waves weaken, not how hard the ground shakes at any one place. The spacing of the ripples is widened so they show at globe scale.
Build
A shared WebGL globe built on three.js, with the waves drawn by a GPU shader that raises and lights the surface. There is no server: the page reads USGS directly, and everything else is static files.