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.

You can pin places you care about — home, family, somewhere you're travelling — and every event will show how far it is from them. Saved places live in your browser's local storage and are never uploaded, because there is no Klaxon server to upload them to. Using the device's location is optional and only ever happens when you tap the button that asks for it; nothing is tracked in the background, and there are no alerts.

Every earthquake has a link you can copy and send. Opening it centres that event on the map, even if it has already dropped out of the live window — the map then asks USGS for that one event directly.

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 detections as satellite imagery, plots named fires from NASA EONET, and adds official incidents from NSW RFS (Fires Near Me), VicEmergency, and large US wildfires from NIFC. Tap a marker for the last update.

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
  Named active fires from NASA EONET, over NASA FIRMS / GIBS satellite detections (VIIRS, 375 m).
• 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, and no account needed to use the map. 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.

Free and paid

The map is free and is going to stay that way. The live map, the event history, the news page, saved places, and all four languages are the free product. None of it will be moved behind a payment, and none of it will carry advertising. Selling attention on a disaster map is the one thing this project will not do.

Alongside it we're building a paid tier, provisionally called Klaxon Pro, for people who want Klaxon to tell them when something happens rather than be checked. The idea is watch zones: save a place, set a threshold — magnitude 5 and above within 200 km, say — and get a notification when a matching event shows up in the USGS or NASA feeds. None of this has launched and the price isn't settled, so treat it as a statement of direction, not a promise of dates. If you want to be told when it exists, there is a waitlist.

The reason for charging at all is that notifications need infrastructure the free map doesn't. Today Klaxon is a static page and your browser talks straight to USGS, which costs almost nothing to run. Watch zones need a server that reads the feeds continuously, matches them against saved zones, and delivers messages, plus app store fees if the same thing ships as an installable app. We'd rather that was funded by the people who want it than by advertising, or by selling data about where our users live.

Who makes it

Klaxon was started by Asher Malone in Sydney, Australia, and a small group works on it now. There's no company behind it and no outside funding — just a few people who wanted one calm map of what's going on in the world, and who would like it to earn enough to keep running. Klaxon shares its design system and codebase pattern with HantaWatch, an outbreak surveillance tracker Asher built earlier this year for the MV Hondius hantavirus outbreak.

Today 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. Watch zones will change part of that, because a server has to hold the zones you save and the address it sends notifications to. When that ships we'll say plainly what is kept and for how long. Everything described on this page as working today runs entirely in your browser. If something looks wrong or breaks, that's on us; 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.