About
A real-time viewer for Iceland's earthquakes and GPS ground deformation. The goal is to make the context of seismic activity (location, depth, age, and magnitude) easier to grasp at a glance. The 2D map and 3D scene stay in sync, and an optional Ground motion layer shows how GPS stations are moving, both as arrows on the map and as charts for individual stations.
What you can do
- Browse earthquakes from the last hour up to a full year.
- Travel back through 35 years of history (1991 to today): drag "now" to any past moment and the whole view (map, 3D, and charts) shows that window. Find the days before an eruption, or the last time an area was this active.
- Replay any window as a time-lapse: press play and watch a swarm build up and migrate over hours or days, on the map, 3D view, and charts at once.
- See whether now is unusual: the time-travel scrubber carries an activity ribbon of the whole 1991-to-today catalogue, and a one-line caption ranks the window you are viewing against every comparable window in the same area.
- Filter by magnitude or review status, and highlight recent activity.
- Explore earthquake depth in a synchronized 3D scene, with an optional true-scale mode that drops the depth exaggeration to show real 1:1 proportions with the surface.
- Toggle Ground motion to see GPS station velocities and vertical uplift over 30, 90, 180 day or 1 year windows, and a badge flags stations drifting from their baseline.
- Every view, filter, and selected station lives in the URL. Copy the link, share the view.
- Available in Icelandic and English.
Data Source
Earthquake and GPS time-series data provided by Veðurstofa Íslands (Icelandic Meteorological Office). Some of the data may be preliminary and subject to revision.
A small number of large earthquakes fall in gaps of IMO's migrated catalogue, where whole days are currently missing. Those events are shown from USGS data, marked by their event id, until IMO restores the original records.
Terrain data from Terrain Tiles.
Historical data
Earthquakes before 2016 come from the Icelandic Meteorological Office's SIL network, which recorded Iceland's earthquakes from 1991 and whose weekly bulletins were expert-reviewed. Two things to keep in mind: the local-magnitude scale Iceland's networks use saturates for the very largest events, so a set of major mainshocks - the June 2000 South Iceland earthquakes, the May 2008 Ölfus earthquake, and the largest shocks in the 2014 Bárðarbunga, June 2020 North Iceland and October 2020 Reykjanes sequences - are shown at their published moment magnitude (Mw, from USGS, the Global CMT catalogue and IMO) rather than the lower local value; and a large shock genuinely sets off many earthquakes on nearby faults, so during the biggest sequences you will see dense clusters of real events within seconds. Region labels are only available from 2016 onward.
Privacy
This site does not use cookies or any client-side tracking. We do not collect or store personal data.
We use Cloudflare Web Analytics to collect anonymous, aggregated usage statistics such as page views, referrers, browser type, and country. No personally identifiable information is collected or stored, and visitors are not tracked across sites. For details on how Cloudflare handles data, see their privacy policy.
We also count which features are used (such as the 3D view, time travel, or the map) as anonymous, aggregated, sampled totals, with no cookies and no identifiers, purely to guide what to improve.
Embed
Covering an earthquake or a swarm? Add a live, interactive view to your story with a single iframe - configure the area, time window and framing to fit your piece. It adds credit and links back to earthquakes.is.
Contact
Have feedback or questions? Get in touch.
About the author
I've long been interested in visualizing earthquakes, and earthquakes.is is a side project I work on in my spare time. I'd be grateful for any feedback, ideas, or comments. Find me on X at @baerinq.