🌎 The Hazard Globe

Earthquakes are the past 24 hours from USGS, sized by magnitude. Disasters are current orange and red alerts from GDACS (UN/EC). Volcanoes are this week's erupting and restless ones from the Smithsonian — watch how neatly they trace the plate boundaries the earthquakes do. Fireballs are recent atmospheric impacts logged by NASA/JPL — note how many land over ocean, which is most of the planet and most of the reason they hurt nobody. Wildfires and severe storms come from NASA's EONET tracker — a global system, though in practice its open wildfire reports run heavily North American, because that is where its feeder agencies file. The shaded half is real night, computed from the Sun's position right now.

📷 And here is the actual planet

Photographed by EPIC aboard DSCOVR — the same spacecraft a million miles upwind that measures the solar wind on Solar Outbreak Watch. It sees the whole sunlit face at once, which is why there is no night side in this one. Taken 2026-09-21 11:38 UTC, centred over 6.02°N 2.99°E, one of 12 frames that day. Images publish a day or two behind real time.

What is plotted on the globe

Five separate feeds, drawn on one sphere because they share the only thing that matters here — a position on the Earth. They are not otherwise related, and reading them together is the point: on any given day the planet has a few hundred earthquakes, a handful of erupting volcanoes, a dozen or so wildfires large enough to be tracked from orbit, and occasionally something arriving from outside the atmosphere entirely.

Earthquakes

From the USGS, sized by magnitude. The scale is logarithmic, so a magnitude 7 releases roughly a thousand times the energy of a magnitude 5 rather than slightly more — which is why the largest dot on the globe is rarely a matter of degree. Most of them trace plate boundaries, and after a few minutes watching you can pick out the Ring of Fire without being told where it is.

Volcanoes

Weekly activity reports from the Smithsonian Global Volcanism Program. “Active” here covers everything from a plume of steam to a genuine eruption, and most of what is marked is doing something undramatic and has been for months.

Major disaster alerts

GDACS, the joint UN and European Commission system, at orange and red level only. Its alert level is modelled on likely humanitarian impact rather than raw geophysical size, which is why a moderate earthquake under a dense city outranks a huge one under open ocean.

Wildfires and storms

NASA’s EONET tracker. Worth knowing that its open wildfire reporting runs heavily North American: that is where its feeder agencies file, not where fires actually happen. Absence of a marker over a continent is not evidence that nothing is burning there.

Fireballs

Bright meteors detected entering the atmosphere by US government sensors, from NASA/JPL, with the energy released given in kilotons of TNT. Almost all of it is spent tens of miles up. That is the only reason these are a curiosity rather than a chapter heading, and it is also why you will see entries over the middle of oceans that nobody on Earth witnessed.

The globe is an orthographic projection — the view you would genuinely have from a long way off, rather than a flattened map. It has the honest disadvantage that half the planet is behind the far side at any moment. For everything at once in list form, the flat version carries the same feeds.