The ground is never still. An ordinary day brings a couple of hundred recorded events, nearly all of them too small for anyone to feel. Switch to the past week and it is over two thousand. That is not a bad week - it is a completely normal one, which is the reason to draw it.

One day on its own is still scattered specks, which is why the archive is the default: 26 years of the strong events at once, showing a pattern a single day never can. The thin blue lines beneath the dots are the plate boundaries, and they are there because the dots and the boundaries are the same story told twice.

Click a dot for magnitude, depth, time, position and a link straight to the event at the USGS. Drag to spin the globe, scroll to come closer.

Moment magnitude is logarithmic. One whole step means roughly ten times the ground motion on the seismograph and about 32 times the energy released. An M7 is not "a bit worse" than an M6, it is thirty M6 events at once. That is why the dots here grow as a power of magnitude rather than linearly: a linear map would make the big ones invisible.

Depth is the second number that decides how dangerous an event is, which is why the colour carries it. Shallow events, under 70 km, are the destructive ones, because the energy has a short path to the surface. Between 70 and 300 km they are usually felt but less destructive, and below 300 km sit the deepest, down in the slabs sinking into the mantle. The deepest measured are around 700 km. Below that the rock is no longer brittle enough to break.

Spin the globe to the Pacific and the line draws itself. Around 90 per cent of the world's earthquakes happen along the Ring of Fire, where ocean plates dive under the continents from New Zealand up past Japan, across to Alaska and down the length of the Americas. The other great line runs from the Mediterranean through Turkey and Iran to the Himalaya, where Africa and India push north. You do not need a plate map to see the plates. The earthquakes are the map.

Norway sits in the middle of a plate, which is why it is quiet here. Quiet, not dead: several hundred events a year are recorded in Norway and Norwegian waters, nearly all below the threshold anyone would notice. The strongest known in historical time was the Lurøy earthquake of 1819, estimated at around magnitude 5.8 from damage reports rather than instruments. The Norwegian part of what you see here is monitored by the Norwegian National Seismic Network at the University of Bergen - the national network is run from this city.

Measured: positions, magnitude, depth and time come unaltered from the USGS. The archive is one query against their ComCat API, stored as a fixed file because 26 years of history does not change; the live windows are re-fetched every five minutes. The day-night terminator is computed from the Sun's real position for the moment you open the page. The surface is NASA-derived imagery, not a drawing.

Chosen: dot size is a legibility decision, not an area - it says nothing about where an event was felt. The depth colour stops sit where the geology puts them, but the transitions between them are smooth because it looks better. The dots float a hair above the surface, or half of them would be swallowed by the globe they belong to.

Sources and licences. Event data: USGS Earthquake Hazards Program, freely available. Plate boundaries: Peter Bird's PB2002 model, GeoJSON by Hugo Ahlenius / Nordpil, ODC-BY-1.0. Earth maps: NASA-derived textures, taken from ethanplusai/earth-moon-solar (MIT), which is also the source of the surface material recipe. 3D: three.js (MIT). This page uses photographs, unlike our solar system, where nothing is an image.