The Earth, inside its layers, earthquakes, volcanoes and seismic waves

Every layer here is drawn from a published model; where the science is uncertain or a feature is inferred, the key says so. Drag to turn, scroll or pinch to zoom, hover for what is under the pointer.

Surface

Relief & sea floor True colour

See-through opaque Plate boundaries (PB2002)

Earthquakes

Show earthquakes (USGS, M2.5 and up)

Month Year 5 years Decade

From M 4.5 Up to M 9.5

All, through the surface Only near the cut

Within 100 km

Dots are sized by magnitude and coloured by depth. Worldwide the catalogue is complete only above about M4.5; smaller events come mostly from regions with dense seismometer networks, the US above all.

Seismic waves

Send an earthquake’s waves through the Earth, watch them reach a seismograph, and compare the real recording with a simulated one.

…or turn on Earthquakes above, click any dot and choose “Show its seismic waves”.

Cutaway

Cut the Earth open

Wedge Slice through A–B Sliding plane

North half Pole to pole South half

Opening 90° Turn 20°E

View

Double-click any point — on a cut face or on the surface — to zoom in and turn around it.

A link from the board can open the viewer on an earthquake. To see what that looks like:

On the cut faces

Depth stretch ×1 (true scale)

Stretches the top 700 km so the crust and lithosphere can be seen; the rest of the mantle is squeezed to make room. The core is always to scale.

Boundaries as shells

Whole surfaces, seen through a see-through surface or the cut.

shallowdeep

Key

Where this comes from

Relief: GEBCO Compilation Group (2026), GEBCO_2026 Grid, 15″. True colour: NASA Blue Marble Next Generation (Stöckli et al. 2005), July 2004. City lights: NASA Earth Observatory, Black Marble 2016 (Suomi NPP VIIRS day–night band; public domain), the lights separated from moonlit land and ice by colour.

Magnetic field: IGRF-14, the International Geomagnetic Reference Field, 14th generation (IAGA Working Group V-MOD; Alken et al. 2025), as bundled with ppigrf (K. Laundal). Dip poles computed from it here.

Magnetosphere: the Tsyganenko T96 model (Tsyganenko 1995, JGR 100; Tsyganenko & Stern 1996, JGR 101), translated from geopack (S. Tian, MIT licence). Magnetopause: Shue et al. (1998), JGR 103. Storm strength: O’Brien & McPherron (2000), JASTP 62. Solar wind, Dst and Kp: NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center (Kyoto World Data Center for Dst). CMEs: NASA CCMC DONKI and WSA-ENLIL forecasts.

Gravity: EIGEN-6C4 (Förste et al. 2014, GFZ Potsdam, doi:10.5880/icgem.2015.1, CC BY 4.0), geoid and gravity grids computed by the ICGEM service and packaged by the Fatiando a Terra project (fatiando-data); normal gravity with Boule (Fatiando). Topography for the Bouguer correction: ETOPO1 (Amante & Eakins 2009, NOAA; public domain). Spherical harmonics with SHTOOLS (Wieczorek & Meschede 2018).

Crust and lithosphere: LITHO1.0 (Pasyanos, Masters, Laske & Ma 2014, JGR 119).

410/660 km at stations: Tauzin, Debayle & Wittlinger (2008), JGR 113.

Lower mantle: tomography models from the EarthScope/IRIS Earth Model Collaboration.

Core radii and flattening: PREM (Dziewonski & Anderson 1981); flattening of internal boundaries computed from PREM with Clairaut’s equation.

Plate boundaries: Bird (2003), PB2002, G-cubed 4(3).

Seismic rays and travel times: computed here through ak135 (Kennett, Engdahl & Buland 1995) as TauP does (Crotwell et al. 1999). Recordings: Global Seismographic Network (IU, II, IC, CU) via the EarthScope/IRIS FDSN web services. Simulated seismograms: EarthScope Syngine, model ak135f_5s (Krischer et al. 2017, SRL 88; van Driel et al. 2015, Solid Earth 6), with USGS moment tensors.

Earthquakes: U.S. Geological Survey, ANSS Comprehensive Earthquake Catalog (ComCat).

Sunlight