Hypocentre Globe Screensaver
The Hypocentre Globe screensaver plots every earthquake of the last day on a translucent Earth at its true depth below the surface, live from the USGS. It runs in the browser with nothing to install; press ESC to exit.
How the Hypocentre Globe screensaver works
The saver renders with three.js on your GPU. The library is vendored into this site rather than fetched from a CDN, and is loaded only when a 3D screensaver actually runs.
It reads the USGS earthquake feed, which is public and needs no key.
The scene resizes with the window and releases its WebGL context when the saver stops, so shuffle mode and Multi-view can cycle 3D savers without exhausting the browser's context limit.
If WebGL is unavailable the saver says so on screen rather than showing an empty black box.
A worked example
Each quake is a spike running from its hypocentre outward through the crust: the inner end sits at real depth, the outer end pokes out by magnitude. Shallow events are gold, intermediate ones blue, and anything below 300 km violet. Because the globe is translucent, the deep swarms are visible inside it — and they are not scattered. They form sheets dipping beneath the continents, which is the shape of a subducting plate.
Settings & tips
- Accent and Background recolour the scene; Speed changes the pace of both the motion and the camera.
- Add it to a Multi-view grid, though 3D savers are heavier than the 2D ones and a few per screen is plenty.
- Press ESC at any time to leave fullscreen.
Frequently asked questions
- Why does depth matter?
- Because it separates completely different events. A magnitude 6 at 5 km can level a town; the same magnitude at 600 km is a slab of old ocean floor breaking apart far below anyone, and is often not felt at all. A flat map draws them identically.
- How current is it?
- It is the USGS feed of the past 24 hours, refetched every ten minutes. On a normal day that is several hundred events, most of them too small to feel.
- Does this need a special browser or plugin?
- No. It uses WebGL, which every current desktop and mobile browser supports. Nothing is installed and no plugin is required.
- Does it cost anything or need an account?
- No. Every screensaver here is free, runs in the browser and needs no sign-up.