Live Earthquake Map — Recent Earthquakes Worldwide
An interactive, full-screen earthquake map showing recent earthquakes around the world, plotted straight from official USGS seismic feeds. Pan and zoom the live map above to see earthquakes today by location, then scroll down to learn how to read magnitude and depth, use the filters, and interpret what the map is telling you.
What this earthquake map shows
Every circle on the map is a real earthquake recorded by the U.S. Geological Survey. Circles are sized and colored by magnitude — small teal dots for minor tremors, larger orange bubbles for magnitude 4-5 events, and bold red circles for magnitude 5.0 and above — so the strongest recent earthquakes stand out at a glance. As you move the map, the tracker loads the events inside your current viewport, giving you a focused view of seismic activity in any region, from the San Andreas Fault to the Pacific Ring of Fire. A side list keeps every visible earthquake in view with its place name, local time, and depth, and clicking any event centers the map and opens its full details.
The USGS data source and how live it is
All data comes from the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program, the authoritative real-time source for global earthquake monitoring. The tracker reads the USGS "all day", "all week", and "significant" GeoJSON feeds, which USGS updates about once a minute. Those feeds are cached briefly (up to five minutes) for speed, so a newly reported earthquake typically appears on this map within a few minutes of USGS publishing it. Locations, magnitudes, and depths are exactly as USGS reports them — nothing is estimated or smoothed on our end.
How to read magnitude and depth
Magnitude measures the energy an earthquake released, on a logarithmic scale: each whole number is roughly 32 times more energy than the one below it, so a magnitude 6 is vastly stronger than a magnitude 4. As a rough guide, events below magnitude 2.5 are rarely felt, magnitude 2.5-5.4 are often felt and may cause minor damage, magnitude 5.5-6.9 can cause damage in populated areas, and magnitude 7.0+ are major, potentially destructive earthquakes. Depth matters just as much: the depth shown in kilometers is how far below the surface the rupture occurred. Shallow earthquakes (under 70 km) release their energy close to the surface and tend to cause more shaking and damage than deep ones of the same magnitude, which is why this tracker separately counts shallow events in view.
How to use the magnitude, depth, and time filters
- Time window — switch between the past day, the past week, or USGS-flagged significant events to focus on the timeframe you care about.
- Minimum magnitude — filter out background micro-quakes by showing only magnitude 1+, 2.5+, or 4.5+ earthquakes so the map isn't crowded with tiny tremors.
- Search — jump to any city or paste
lat,lng coordinates to inspect seismic activity for a specific area.
- Viewport loading — pan and zoom to load the earthquakes inside your current view, and use the filter box in the side panel to narrow the visible list by place name.
Why a live earthquake map is useful
A live earthquake map turns raw seismic data into something you can actually read. Whether you just felt shaking and want to confirm what happened nearby, you're monitoring an active aftershock sequence, tracking activity along a fault or subduction zone, or you're a teacher, researcher, or emergency planner following global seismicity, seeing recent earthquakes on a map with magnitude and depth in context is far faster than scanning a table of numbers. Because it updates continuously from USGS, it doubles as an at-a-glance situational tool during periods of heightened seismic activity.
Built on the LatLng maps platform
This is a live demo of the LatLng mapping stack. The basemap is rendered from LatLng vector tiles served by the free Maps API, and the same platform lets you serve your own point or boundary data as fast vector tiles through the Datasets API. You can build a map like this one — live circles driven by any GeoJSON feed — on a free tier.
Frequently asked questions
How often does it update?
The underlying USGS feeds refresh about once a minute, and this tracker caches them for up to five minutes, so new earthquakes appear within a few minutes of being reported.
What magnitude is significant?
Magnitude 2.5 and below is rarely felt, magnitude 4-5 can cause noticeable shaking and minor damage, and magnitude 6.0+ can cause serious damage. USGS separately flags high-impact events as "significant" based on magnitude, depth, and population exposure.
What data source does it use?
All earthquake data comes from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Earthquake Hazards Program real-time GeoJSON feeds — the authoritative public source for global seismic monitoring.
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