Live on the globe now: 19 tracked
This layer plots active disaster alerts from GDACS, the Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System — a cooperation framework run by the United Nations and the European Commission to flag major sudden-onset hazards. Each marker is one event: an earthquake, tropical cyclone, flood, volcano, drought, or forest fire that GDACS has scored and triaged. The color is the point. GDACS assigns every event a green, orange, or red alert level based on its estimated humanitarian impact — population exposed, infrastructure, and hazard intensity — so a small quake in open ocean stays green while a cyclone bearing down on a dense coastline goes red. Click an event to inspect its country, hazard type, severity reading (magnitude, wind speed, or affected area), alert score, and a link to the full GDACS report. We pull the GDACS event list roughly every ten minutes and collapse each event's many sub-features (track lines, wind cones, affected-area polygons) down to a single centroid marker. Unlike the raw USGS seismic feed or NASA's EONET event catalog, GDACS is the impact-and-coordination layer: it doesn't just say something happened, it estimates how bad. It is one of about 29 live layers on the overwatch.earth globe.
Data source: GDACS
They are GDACS impact levels. Green is a minor event, orange a medium-impact event that may need a national response, and red a likely high-impact disaster warranting international attention. The level is calculated from the hazard's intensity and the population and assets exposed, not just the raw magnitude.
GDACS covers six sudden-onset hazard types: earthquakes, tropical cyclones, floods, volcanoes, droughts, and forest fires. Each appears as a single marker labeled with its type and affected country.
The earthquakes layer streams every seismic event straight from USGS sensors. This GDACS layer is curated and triaged — it only surfaces events significant enough to warrant an alert, scores their likely humanitarian impact, and spans cyclones, floods, and volcanoes too, not just quakes.
We refresh the GDACS event list about every ten minutes. Alerts are slow-moving by nature, and each event carries its own start date and last-modified time, which you can see when you click into it.