Tremor Is Live: Every Earthquake at Its True Depth

The US Geological Survey republishes its past-day earthquake summary roughly once a minute, and that feed effectively never runs dry. Our proxy relies on it: an empty feature array is treated as a failed fetch, because a day with no earthquakes on it means the pipe broke, not that the Earth went still. Vaynerov Project Tremor ships today on exactly that premise — a live earthquake visualization that starts propagating a wavefront the moment it loads, because there is always something to propagate.

Tremor pulls two USGS feeds — everything from the past day, plus everything above M4.5 from the past month — and draws up to four thousand events inside a cutaway Earth. They are not surface pins. Each quake sits at its real hypocentral depth, which is why a subduction zone reads as a slab leaning into the mantle rather than a smear of dots on a map. Size is logarithmic in magnitude, capped so an M8 stays a bead instead of a moon. Colour is age: an hours-old event burns orange and cools toward slate across a thirty-day tail.

Select one and the wavefronts leave it. Tremor traces 360 rays per phase through a 1-D velocity model of the interior, bending each one continuously through the velocity gradient and refracting it at every discontinuity, then samples the whole fan at the current replay time to draw a single isochron. The physics arrives as a consequence rather than a feature: the S wave stops dead at the liquid outer core, and past 104° the direct P wave disappears too. We never draw a shadow zone. It is simply the place where no ray arrived.

Then you can listen. Tremor's Listen panel picks a Global Seismographic Network station in the teleseismic band, fetches forty minutes of real vertical-component ground motion, decodes the Steim-compressed miniSEED server-side, and plays it back 150× fast — which lifts the seismic band from 0.05–10 Hz up into 7.5–1500 Hz, where human hearing lives. Forty minutes of the planet ringing becomes about sixteen seconds of sound, and the P onset arrives as an audible crack.

• Pick an event from the ranked list — significance is magnitude minus half its age in days — or tap it directly on the globe.
• Replay at 1×, 60×, 240× or 900×. The first successful load picks a headline quake from the past week and starts it on its own.
• Rotate freely: the hypocentre is slerped onto the polar axis of the cutaway, so whichever event you choose, the exposed faces are a true cross-section through it.
• Six languages, phones included — the expensive passes tier down or drop out, but the geometry and the physics do not change.

Tremor shares its coastline data and its scene scale with Vaynerov Project Orrery: 1,000 km per scene unit in both, so the two flagships are literally the same planet at the same size. It holds to about twenty draw calls with no per-frame allocation, stops computing when the tab is hidden or the canvas scrolls away, and drops the glow ribbon and the ray-fan hints on low-tier devices.

It joins the Lab next to the Orrery, the Reliquary museum and twelve games, and like all of them it is free and needs no account: vaynerov.com/tremor. Open it, pick something big from the past week, and turn your volume up before you press play.