Free · No sign-up · Runs in your browser
Interactive 3D Earthquake Map & Animator
Earthquake Animator turns the raw USGS and EMSC earthquake catalogs into something you can actually watch. Instead of a flat map of dots, quakes are replayed in time order on a 3D globe — so you see seismicity the way it really happens: as a sequence, along plate boundaries, at different depths, building and fading.
Pick any date range and region, set a magnitude window, and press play. The globe animates every matching earthquake as a glowing pulse sized by magnitude, while tectonic plate boundaries, active fault lines and volcanoes sit underneath as optional layers. You can slow the animation down, run it in reverse, cut a cross-section into the Earth to study depth, or drop into a clean cinematic view with the interface hidden.
What you can do with it
- Animate over time
- Replay any window of the earthquake catalog as a time-ordered animation, from a single day to more than a century of recorded seismicity.
- Search & filter
- Constrain by start and end date, magnitude range, and a search area — either a centre with a radius or a north/south/east/west box — anywhere from a single city to the whole planet.
- See depth in 3D
- Tint quakes by depth, or switch to the cross-section view and look at hypocentres inside the Earth rather than flattened onto a surface map.
- Geological layers
- Overlay tectonic plate boundaries, active faults, Holocene volcanoes, country and US state borders, rivers, lakes and a coordinate grid.
- Control playback
- Pause, scrub, slow down to an hour of simulated time per second, or run the sequence backwards to unwind a sequence you just watched.
- Sun & Moon
- Place the real Sun and Moon at their true sky positions for the animation's current moment, with an optional day/night terminator across the globe.
Why animate earthquakes instead of mapping them?
A static earthquake map answers "where". An animation answers "where, when, and in what order" — and that ordering is where most of the geology lives. Aftershock sequences unfold outward from a mainshock over hours and days. Swarms pulse and stop. Subduction zones fire in patterns a single snapshot flattens into an undifferentiated smear of dots.
The same is true of depth. Earthquake catalogs are inherently three-dimensional — every event has a latitude, a longitude and a hypocentre depth — but almost every earthquake map throws that third number away, or reduces it to a colour. On a globe you can rotate, a subducting slab stops being a colour legend and becomes a visible plane of earthquakes dipping down beneath a continent.
Not an alerting service. Earthquake Animator is a visualization and education tool built on the public USGS catalog. For official warnings, real-time alerts and hazard guidance, go to the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program.
Understanding earthquake depth
Depth is the most under-used number in any earthquake report, and it explains a great deal about what a quake will feel like. Seismologists group hypocentres into three broad classes:
| Class | Depth | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Shallow | 0 – 70 km | The great majority of earthquakes, and the most destructive for a given magnitude — the energy has less rock to travel through before it reaches the surface. |
| Intermediate | 70 – 300 km | Occur inside descending slabs of oceanic crust at subduction zones. Shaking is felt over a wider area but is usually less intense directly above. |
| Deep | 300 – ~700 km | Confined almost entirely to subducting slabs. Below roughly 700 km earthquakes effectively stop — the slab has warmed enough to deform without fracturing. |
Plot those depths in three dimensions along a subduction zone and they line up on a dipping surface, deepening away from the trench. That surface is the Wadati–Benioff zone, and it is the clearest direct evidence we have of one tectonic plate descending beneath another. It is also very hard to see on a flat map and almost impossible to miss in a cross-section. More on reading earthquake depth →
Reading magnitude
Magnitude scales are logarithmic, which is consistently underestimated. Each whole step up represents about ten times the ground-motion amplitude and roughly 32 times the energy release. A magnitude 7 is not "a bit worse" than a magnitude 6 — it releases around 32 times more energy, and a magnitude 8 releases about a thousand times more.
Modern large earthquakes are reported on the moment magnitude scale (Mw), which is derived from the physical size of the rupture — fault area multiplied by slip. It replaced the original 1935 Richter scale for significant events because Richter magnitudes saturate: above roughly magnitude 7 they stop meaningfully increasing no matter how large the rupture actually is.
In the animator, pulse size scales with magnitude and colour is assigned by band, so a single great earthquake reads instantly against the background of smaller events around it.
Explore by topic
Guides to each layer and what it shows, with the map set up for that question:
Frequently asked questions
Is Earthquake Animator free to use?
Yes. It is completely free, requires no account or sign-up, and runs entirely in your web browser. There is nothing to install.
Where does the earthquake data come from?
Every earthquake shown is queried live from two public catalogs: the USGS Earthquake Catalog (ComCat), the United States Geological Survey's record of global seismicity, and the Euro-Mediterranean Seismological Centre (EMSC) catalog, which pools around 120 national seismic networks and lists far more small quakes outside the United States. You can search either catalog alone or both together; when both are used, the same earthquake reported by each is matched by time, location and magnitude and shown once, and hovering a quake tells you which catalog it came from. Results reflect whatever the agencies currently publish for the range you request.
Can I see how deep an earthquake was?
Yes. Depth is a first-class dimension in the tool. Quakes can be tinted by depth on the globe, and the cross-section view cuts into the Earth so you can see hypocentres arranged by depth rather than flattened onto a surface map.
What do the colours and sizes of the pulses mean?
Each earthquake appears as a glowing pulse whose size scales with magnitude. Colour is assigned by magnitude band — low (magnitude 5.0 and under), mid (5.0 to 7.0) and high (7.0 and above) — and every band colour, radius and scale is adjustable in the settings panel.
Does it show tectonic plates, fault lines and volcanoes?
Yes. Tectonic plate boundaries, active fault lines and Holocene volcanoes are each separate overlays you can switch on or off, alongside country borders, US state borders, rivers, lakes and a coordinate grid.
Does Earthquake Animator work on phones and tablets?
Yes. The globe runs on mobile browsers with touch controls for rotating, zooming and inspecting quakes. Rendering quality adapts automatically to the device, and you can switch between the WebGL and WebGPU renderers manually.
Data & credits
Earthquake data comes from the USGS FDSN event web service (public domain) and the EMSC SeismicPortal FDSN event web service (CC BY 4.0), queried live for the range you choose — USGS is densest inside the United States, EMSC pools ~120 national networks and is far denser everywhere else, and the two are merged and de-duplicated when you search both. Plate boundaries, active faults and Holocene volcano locations are drawn from published open geological datasets. The globe is rendered with three.js using WebGPU where the browser supports it and WebGL everywhere else.
Built by Squimball Studios. If it is useful to you, there are support links in the bar at the top of the page.