Live Earth Map
Earthquakes, wildfires, volcanoes, severe storms and floods from the last few days, drawn on one map and refreshed every five minutes. The dashed lines are tectonic plate boundaries, which is why the quakes sit where they do.
The whole world, uncropped.
Pick a place
The map above is ranked by what matters globally, which is almost never what matters to you. Search for a town or pick one below, and this will list what has happened within 300 km of it.
Table view, the same points as text
| Size | Where | When |
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Where the data comes from
Earthquakes come from the USGS and the EMSC together, because neither is enough on its own. Outside the United States the USGS catalogue is effectively magnitude 4 and up: within 200 km of Istanbul over a year it lists 8 earthquakes, where the EMSC lists 5,176. When both report the same quake, you see it once.
Wildfires, volcanoes and storms come from NASA EONET and GDACS. Significant only means the same thing whichever service reported an event: magnitude 6 for an earthquake, a wildfire over 17,000 hectares, or an Orange or Red alert from GDACS. A fire counts on its size as well as its alert level, because a very large fire far from anyone is still graded low for the harm it does to people.
Pin a place and the map also asks NASA FIRMS what is burning within 300 km of it, drawn as hollow triangles. These are raw satellite heat detections: nobody has named or confirmed them, which is why they never look like the solid wildfire markers. They are here because the curated services miss real fires. A 3,544 MW fire in the Belgian Hautes Fagnes had no reported event within 100 km of it.
A hot pixel is not a wildfire. Steelworks, refineries and flare stacks burn every night, and near Amsterdam they outnumber everything else: over five days FIRMS reported more detections there than in Iberia at the height of fire season. What separates them is time, not brightness, so anything still burning at the same spot a fortnight earlier is treated as industry and removed. A large wildfire is a run of days that ends.
Their hectares are worked out here, not published anywhere: the ground each satellite pass saw alight, counted once per patch however many times it was passed over. That is a floor, and a smaller number than a fire's mapped outline, which also counts unburnt ground inside it. On the Belgian fire the two read 2,700 and 6,345 hectares, and 2,700 is the figure the fire service gave.
A big earthquake stays for a week, since a magnitude 6 is rare enough that a single day would usually show none at all. A fire is measured from its last report rather than the day it started, so one that has burned for weeks and is still being reported stays on the map. Anything that has gone quiet for seven days drops off.
A volcano is marked recently active, never "erupting". The feed records when a volcano last showed activity, not whether it is erupting at this moment, so only volcanoes that have reported within the last six months appear here.
Nothing here is a forecast, and nothing here is an official warning. For those, follow your national emergency service.
LiveTerra
This page can tell you what happened. The app tells you when it happens: pick the places you care about, your home, family abroad, somewhere you are travelling, and get a notification when something significant occurs near one of them.
Coming soon LiveTerra for iPhone