Natural Disasters in the World

Global Natural Disasters — Top 10 Active Events

A live map of the world's most significant ongoing natural disasters, updated automatically from GDACS (Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System).

How to use the map

Each event is shown as a coloured dot on the map — the colour indicates the disaster category (earthquakes, wildfires, storms, etc.). The area affected by each event is visualised directly on the map without any interaction needed.

Clicking a dot opens an info card with event details and highlights that event's area, while all other events are visually dimmed so the extent of the selected event is immediately clear. Click anywhere else on the map to deselect.

The info card shows:

• Category and event name
• Date range (or ongoing status)
• Alert level (Green / Orange / Red)
• Magnitude, intensity, or people affected (depending on event type)
• A direct link to the GDACS event report (Press Ctrl/Cmd + click to open in a new tab)

Use the category filter buttons at the bottom of the map to show or hide specific disaster types.

Which 10 events are shown

Events are fetched from the GDACS API for the past 30 days across six categories: earthquakes, tropical cyclones, floods, volcanoes, droughts, and wildfires. GDACS assigns each event an alert score — a composite index that weighs the physical severity of the hazard against the number of people exposed and their vulnerability. The 10 events with the highest alert score are displayed. When scores are tied, events are ranked by the largest physical magnitude within their category. Alert level is a simplified reading of the same assessment:

What the severity values mean

The severity shown in each event card is the most relevant physical measure for that disaster type:

Earthquakes — Richter / moment magnitude (M) The scale is logarithmic: each whole number represents roughly 32× more energy released than the one before.

• M 4–4.9 — Light. Felt indoors, rarely damaging.
• M 5–5.9 — Moderate. Can cause damage to poorly constructed buildings.
• M 6–6.9 — Strong. Damaging over wide areas.
• M 7–7.9 — Major. Severe damage, potential for large casualties.
• M 8+ — Catastrophic. Devastating over very large regions.

Tropical cyclones / storms — Saffir–Simpson category based on sustained wind speed:

• Category 1: ~35 m/s (~80 mph) — Damage to roofs, trees, and power outage likely
• Category 2: ~45 m/s (~100 mph) — Extensice damage to well-constructed homes, uprooting of trees snapping power lines.
• Category 3: ~55 m/s (~120 mph) — Devastating damage, chance of removal of roof decking.
• Category 4: ~65 m/s (140~ mph) — Catastrophic damage, likely to cause severe structural damage to most buildings.
• Category 5: ≥70 m/s (≥150 mph) — Catastrophic damage, high percentage of framed homes destroyed.

Wildfires and Droughts — Area affected in km² A standard football pitch is roughly 0.007 km²; the city of Paris is about 105 km².

Floods — People affected (deaths + missing + displaced) GDACS does not provide a physical area or water volume measure for flood events. The best available metric from their database is the human impact count sourced from Sendai Framework reporting: the sum of fatalities, missing persons, and displaced people.

Volcanoes — VEI (Volcanic Explosivity Index) A logarithmic scale from 0 to 8 measuring the volume and column height of an eruption.

• VEI 0–1 — Gentle, non-explosive (e.g. Hawaiian lava flows)
• VEI 2–3 — Explosive but moderate (e.g. Stromboli type)
• VEI 4–5 — Large — can affect regional air traffic and climate
• VEI 6–8 — Colossal to mega-colossal — rare, globally significant

How affected areas are visualised

Where GDACS provides polygon geometry, the actual geographic footprint of each event is drawn directly on the map. Clicking an event highlights its area and dims all others.

• Tropical cyclones — Three nested wind probability cones from GDACS: green (outer, lower wind probability), orange (moderate), and red (inner core with highest sustained winds).
• Wildfires, Floods, Droughts — GDACS polygon of the affected or burned area.
• Volcanoes — GDACS impact circle showing the estimated radius of effect around the eruption site.
• Earthquakes (shakemap) — When GDACS has processed a shakemap, concentric intensity zones are drawn corresponding to MMI (Modified Mercalli Intensity) levels 4 through 9+, ranging from light shaking felt by people to violent ground motion causing structural collapse. The zones grow more opaque toward the epicentre.
• Earthquakes (estimated circle) — For all earthquakes, an estimated felt-area circle is always shown. The radius uses the seismological approximation R = 10^(0.5 × M − 1) km, giving roughly 30 km for M 5, 100 km for M 6, and 315 km for M 7.

How the world map is rendered

The map is built entirely in the browser using D3.js — no map tile server or external imagery is required. The base world geometry comes from Natural Earth data (110 m resolution), encoded as TopoJSON and projected client-side using the Winkel Tripel projection, which minimises distortion of both area and shape across the globe. Country borders, graticule lines, and the ocean background are all SVG paths computed from that geometry. Event dots and area polygons are also SVG elements placed by projecting their geographic coordinates through the same projection function, keeping everything in a single coordinate space.