What is Klaxon?

Klaxon is an independent, real-time tracker for global emergency events. It covers earthquakes worldwide, earthquakes flagged for tsunami warning, and satellite wildfire detections. Armed conflicts are next.

What it does

Klaxon shows where significant events are happening right now, on one map, in one place — without the friction of jumping between government bulletins, news feeds, and academic data portals.

The current release ingests the public USGS earthquake feed and displays events of magnitude 3.5 and above from the last hour, day, or week. Markers are sized and coloured by magnitude. Click a marker for depth, time, coordinates, and a link to the USGS detail page. The amber overlay traces the world's tectonic plate boundaries, so it's immediately visible that most earthquakes follow them.

Data refreshes every minute. Nothing is stored server-side; the map talks directly to USGS in your browser.

Two further layers sit behind the hazard selector in the header. The tsunami view shows every earthquake USGS flagged for tsunami warning over the past 12 months — a separate query, since the live summary feeds only reach back seven days. The wildfire view overlays NASA FIRMS active-fire detections as satellite imagery: a coverage layer rather than discrete events, so it has no markers to click.

What's coming

Each emergency type has its own authoritative feed. Klaxon's plan is to layer them onto the same map and unify the visual language so a fire, a quake, and a tsunami warning feel like part of one system rather than three different products.

• Live
  Earthquakes
  USGS feed, M3.5+, refreshed every minute. Plate boundaries overlaid.
• Live
  Tsunami sources
  Every earthquake USGS flagged for tsunami warning over the past 12 months. Wave arrival times from NOAA coming later.
• Live
  Wildfires
  NASA FIRMS active-fire detections (VIIRS, 375 m), drawn as a satellite coverage layer via NASA GIBS.
• Later
  Armed conflicts
  ACLED-style geolocated incident reporting, with a strong editorial filter on source quality.

Why build this

When something serious happens — a quake near a major city, a wildfire near a populated area, a tsunami advisory — the first few minutes of looking for information are usually frustrating. The authoritative data exists, but it's spread across agency websites that load slowly, use unfamiliar interfaces, and rarely talk to each other. News coverage fills the gap, but with the trade-off of speculation and inconsistency.

Klaxon's job is to be the single map you check first. Fast, sober, accurate. Authoritative sources only. No ads, no tracking, no signup. If a category of event isn't on Klaxon yet, that's fine — it'll be added when the right primary feed is wired in, not before.

Who makes it

Klaxon is built by Asher Malone — based in Sydney, Australia. It's a hobby project, not a company. There's no team, no funding, no business model: just one person who finds it useful to have a single, calm map of what's going on in the world. Klaxon shares its design system and codebase pattern with HantaWatch, an outbreak surveillance tracker I built earlier this year for the MV Hondius hantavirus outbreak.

Klaxon is a single static page deployed on Netlify. The map talks directly to USGS in your browser — there's no Klaxon backend, no analytics, no tracking, no ads. If something looks wrong or breaks, that's on me; if it's quietly working, that's the goal.

Feedback

Spotted a bug, want to suggest a feature, or know of a better authoritative feed for an event type? Get in touch via the sources page contact line. Klaxon is early; the more pointed the feedback, the more useful.