Track Earthquakes, Volcanoes and Wildfires in Your Browser

Recent quakes worldwide and near you — magnitude, depth, location and time, straight from the USGS feed. Filter by magnitude and time range, sort by distance, and flag events that carry a USGS impact alert or felt reports.

The catch: Magnitude is not the same as what you feel. A shallow magnitude-5 under a city can shake harder than a deep magnitude-6 far offshore. That is why the tracker surfaces impact and felt-report signals, not just the headline number.

The full Holocene catalogue of the world's volcanoes on a map, built on Smithsonian Global Volcanism Program data — search near you, filter by activity and type, and switch on an "Erupting now" filter for those with an open eruption record.

The catch: "Active" does not mean "erupting today." Most active volcanoes are in a repose period that can run for decades. The tracker shows each one's last known eruption for exactly this reason — a date is harder to misread than a status word.

Active-fire detections near you from NASA FIRMS satellite data (the VIIRS instrument on NOAA-20), on a map — filter by time and confidence, sort by distance.

The catch: A hotspot is a heat signature, not a confirmed wildfire. It can be a gas flare, an industrial source or a volcano. Treat it as a signal to verify against official incident information, never as a confirmed fire.

Read the metric, not the marker

Every hazard map reduces a complex event to a coloured dot. A quake's dot hides the difference between magnitude and felt shaking; a fire's dot hides the difference between a hotspot and a confirmed incident; a volcano's dot hides the gap between "active" and "erupting today." The dot is an invitation to read the underlying figure, not a substitute for it.

One tracker never sees everything

Satellite passes have gaps, remote events go unreported for hours, and most submarine activity is never directly observed. Anything presented as a complete real-time picture of a hazard is overstating what the observing network can see. Ours are built on the agency feeds and are only ever as complete as those feeds are.

Aggregated data is for awareness, not safety

This is the line that matters. A browser map is for understanding what is happening in the world. It is never the source for a decision about your own safety — whether to evacuate, whether to travel, whether to shelter. For that, your national and local authorities are the only sources with a duty to be right, and they are the ones to follow.

Can I track earthquakes, volcanoes and wildfires from one place?

Close to it. We run three separate trackers — earthquakes, volcanoes and wildfires — each built on the authoritative agency feed for that hazard: USGS for earthquakes, the Smithsonian Global Volcanism Program for volcanoes, and NASA FIRMS for wildfire detections. They share a design and all open in a browser with no account, so moving between them is quick. They are separate tools rather than one dashboard because the right data source and the right caveats differ for each hazard.

Where does the data come from?

From the agencies, credited in each tool. Earthquake data is the USGS feed; volcano data is the Smithsonian GVP Holocene catalogue and eruption records; wildfire data is NASA FIRMS active-fire detections from the VIIRS instrument on the NOAA-20 satellite. We do not generate any of this data ourselves — what we add is the map, the near-me search and the filters, on a fast interface that asks for nothing.

Is any of this safe to rely on in an emergency?

No, and we would rather say so plainly. None of these trackers is an emergency-management source. Satellite coverage has timing gaps, feeds can lag the real event, and a browser map carries no duty of accuracy about your safety. In an actual emergency — a fire near you, a strong local quake, an eruption in your region — your national observatory, weather service and local emergency services are the only sources that count. Use these tools for awareness and to know when to pay closer attention, then follow the authorities.

How is this different from your live space page?

Our planet-and-sky live page is about astronomy — planet positions, the night sky, close-approaching asteroids — and it deliberately excludes ground hazards. This hub is the opposite: earthquakes, volcanoes and wildfires happening on Earth's surface. They are separate on purpose, so each stays focused on the right data sources and the right way to read them.

Looking up rather than down? Our live planet & sky page covers the astronomy side — deliberately kept separate from these ground hazards.