Live earthquake map with real depth

Why depth changes what you see

Flat earthquake maps use colour or dot size to encode depth, which means you have to decode a legend to understand what you are looking at. A 3D globe does not need to: a shallow quake sits on the crust, a 600 km deep one sits well inside the planet.

Plot 24 hours of activity around a subduction zone and the geometry becomes obvious. Quakes near the trench are shallow; the further inland you go, the deeper they get, tracing the descending slab as a sloping plane of events. That single picture explains more about plate tectonics than a page of text.

Reading the feed

Data comes from the United States Geological Survey, which aggregates seismometer networks worldwide and publishes detections continuously. God's Eye View shows a rolling 24-hour window. Each event carries magnitude, depth, location and time.

1. Enable the Earthquakes layer.
2. Zoom out to a hemisphere view — the Ring of Fire draws itself.
3. Click any event for magnitude, depth and origin time.
4. Tilt the camera low to the horizon to read depth structure properly.

What a quiet map means

A typical 24 hours contains a few hundred detected events, most of them too small to feel. If the globe looks sparse, that is normal, not a broken feed. Magnitude 2 and below are only detected where instrument density is high, which is why California and Japan look busier than places with equal seismicity but fewer sensors.

This is a visualisation of public seismic data, not an early-warning system. For alerts and official guidance, use your national geological survey or emergency service.