About Rift
Last updated 6 November 2026.
5 November 2026: Event Horizon is now Rift. Same map, new name and address: rift.news. The old addresses still lead here.
Rift is a live map of the world's hazards: earthquakes, severe weather, tropical cyclones, wildfires, volcanoes, tsunamis, floods, space weather and armed conflict, gathered from official sources and shown in one calm place.
Why it exists
When something big happens, the first hour is a mess of rumours, reposts and half-checked numbers. The agencies that actually measure these things, like the US Geological Survey or the National Hurricane Center, publish fast and accurately, but they're spread across dozens of sites. Rift reads those sources directly and puts them on one map, so you can see what is happening, where, and how serious it is, without wading through social media.
Where the data comes from
Every reading on the map comes from a named public source, polled every 1 to 60 minutes depending on how fast that source updates:
- Earthquakes: USGS, the Japan Meteorological Agency and GeoNet New Zealand.
- Weather and floods: the US National Weather Service, Environment and Climate Change Canada and GDACS.
- Tropical cyclones: the NOAA National Hurricane Center.
- Wildfires: NASA FIRMS satellite fire detections.
- Volcanoes: GeoNet, NASA EONET and GDACS.
- Space weather: the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center.
- Conflict: UCDP incident data.
The full list, with each source's licence, is on the terms and data attribution page.
What it tries hard not to do
- Read a failure as calm. If a feed stops answering, the map says the data is unavailable. A missing report is never shown as "nothing happened".
- Write its own safety advice. The Prepare pages quote official agencies word for word. Their words carry more weight than ours.
- Hide who wrote what. Some summaries on the map are written by a language model from the data on screen. Those are labelled as such, and labelled "not a verified assessment". Summaries built by fixed rules say that instead.
- Make predictions it can't be held to. Every forecast on the predictions page has a deadline, a stated probability and what would prove it wrong, and is graded afterwards, misses included.
Reference pages
Besides the live map, the site publishes pages you can read on their own: active fault systems with each fault's normal earthquake rate and current activity, country pages with each country's hazard picture and energy mix, supervolcanoes and large calderas with their current status, and documentation explaining how every number is worked out.
Free alerts
You can turn on push alerts for the countries, kinds of event and severity you care about, with quiet hours. There's no account and no email address involved, and there is no cap on how many people can be warned.
Who runs it
Rift is built and run by one person as part of Fysh, a small collection of free, open-source tools. It's self-hosted, not operated by a company, and the source code is published under the AGPL-3.0 on GitHub. The site carries no ads.
An important limit
This is a monitoring project, not a life-safety channel. In an emergency, follow the instructions of your own national or local agency.
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