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How this data is collected

Earthquakes: from the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program. A global network of seismometers records ground motion; USGS locates each quake by comparing when seismic waves reach many stations, and computes its magnitude from the wave amplitudes. This app pulls that catalog live from the USGS FDSN Event API, no data is stored or altered here.

Basemap: coastlines, country borders and city locations are from Natural Earth, the public-domain dataset used by professional cartographers.

This view: every magnitude-5.0+ earthquake worldwide over the last 5 years (~9,000 events), unfiltered. Change the range with the Data source menu. The full USGS catalog is ~2.9 million events since 1900, too large to stream live in a browser, so a multi-year window is shown.

Data sources: earthquake.usgs.gov/fdsnws · naturalearthdata.com (public domain)

How it's built: earthquake globes are a familiar genre, and most are built on a library such as Three.js, globe.gl or Cesium. This one is written from scratch against the raw WebGPU API (hand-written WGSL shaders, camera and matrix math, instanced rendering), with no map SDK, no framework and no build step. The concept is familiar; the implementation is from scratch.