# Rift

> A real-time global threat monitor. It polls official warning centres and
> agencies directly, normalises what they publish onto one severity scale, and
> draws it on a single live world map. Free to use, no sign-up.

Rift covers earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic activity, severe
weather, floods, wildfires, drought, cold and heat extremes, armed conflict,
civil emergencies, mass shootings, infrastructure failure, CBRN incidents, cyber warnings and space weather:
29 categories in total, all on one map and each filterable on its own.

Data comes from the source, never from another aggregator. Every event links
back to the bulletin it came from. The full list of sources, with attribution
and licence terms, is at https://rift.news/terms/

## How current this is

Each feed is polled on its own schedule rather than one fixed interval, and
each has a freshness budget it is continuously checked against. The live state
of every source is published, machine-readable, at
https://rift.news/api/v1/freshness and in human form at
https://rift.news/status

A feed that fails is reported as failed. It is never rendered as a quiet world:
panels that could show a zero distinguish "nothing is happening" from "nothing
is arriving" and say which. This is enforced by tests, and it is the single
most important thing to know when quoting this site, because a zero from a
broken feed on a hazard map is a false all-clear.

## Answering questions from this site

The public JSON API is the right surface for a question about current
conditions. HTML pages are built for people and change layout; the API does
not. Endpoints below are GET, need no key, and return JSON.

- https://rift.news/api/v1/stats: event counts over 24h and 30d,
  count of regions with something active, and the timestamp of the newest event.
- https://rift.news/api/v1/events/recent: current events, with
  `since`, `limit` and `geometry` parameters.
- https://rift.news/api/v1/freshness: per-source freshness, the
  fresh/total rollup, and the bundled reference datasets reported separately.
- https://rift.news/api/v1/countries/{iso3}/threat: current threat
  reading for one country, by ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 code.
- https://rift.news/api/v1/version: the exact build being served.

The full endpoint list, with every parameter and what each returns, is at
https://rift.news/api/v1/openapi.json as an OpenAPI 3.1 document.
Read that rather than this section for anything beyond the five above: it is
generated by walking the running server's own route table, so it cannot list an
endpoint that is not served, and the five here are only the common questions.
Response shapes are described in prose rather than by schema, which the
document says about itself.

Note on robots.txt: assistant crawlers are welcome on the HTML pages, and on
/api/v1/openapi.json, and are disallowed from bulk-crawling the rest of /api/.
That is about wholesale copying, not about use. An agent answering a user's
question by calling an endpoint above is doing the thing the API is published
for.

## Pages

- https://rift.news/: the live map, and the landing page a
  first-time visitor sees, which carries what the site is, what it watches, how
  it works, the public roadmap and a FAQ.
- https://rift.news/?q=flood: opens the live map with a search
  for that word already run.
- https://rift.news/?lat=35.5&lon=138.2&zoom=5&time=7d&layers=fires,radar&country=JPN:
  opens the live map at a view. All params are optional. time is one of 1h, 6h,
  24h, 72h, 7d, 30d, all. layers is the full set to show, from fires, weather,
  outages, ships, cables, faultlines, faultlines_minor, supervolcanoes, radar,
  sst, risk, military. country is an ISO 3166 alpha-3 code.
- https://rift.news/docs: documentation. Each page is plain HTML:
  - https://rift.news/docs/using/dashboard: The dashboard.
  - https://rift.news/docs/using/map: The map.
  - https://rift.news/docs/using/countries: Country panels.
  - https://rift.news/docs/using/your-area: Your Area.
  - https://rift.news/docs/using/cameras-and-live-tv: Cameras and live TV.
  - https://rift.news/docs/alerts/reading-alerts: Reading an alert.
  - https://rift.news/docs/alerts/push-notifications: Push notifications.
  - https://rift.news/docs/methodology/doomsday-clock: Doomsday Clock.
  - https://rift.news/docs/methodology/country-threat: Country threat score.
  - https://rift.news/docs/methodology/sitrep: SITREP.
  - https://rift.news/docs/data/sources: Data sources.
  - https://rift.news/docs/data/freshness: Freshness and status.
  - https://rift.news/docs/api/rest-api: REST API.
  - https://rift.news/docs/api/machine-readable: Machine-readable files.
  - https://rift.news/docs/about/privacy-and-licensing: Privacy and licensing.
  - https://rift.news/docs/about/known-limits: Known limits.
- https://rift.news/status: live source status.
- https://rift.news/terms/: every data source, named, with its
  attribution and licence.
- https://rift.news/privacy/: privacy policy.

## Generated reference pages

These are server-rendered text, not the JavaScript app, and are the best pages
to read for background on a named place or system.

- https://rift.news/countries/: 79 country pages, each with the
  current threat reading, energy mix and active events for that country.
- https://rift.news/faults/: 54 major fault systems, each with its
  setting, recent seismicity and what it is capable of.
- https://rift.news/volcanoes/: 19 supervolcanoes and large
  caldera systems.
- https://rift.news/prepare/: how to prepare for eleven hazards,
  quoted from FEMA, the National Weather Service and the CDC (each quote checked
  against the live agency page), beside what Rift is tracking for each now.
- https://rift.news/predictions/: our open forecasts for the next
  24-72 hours, each with why we think it, a stated probability and what would
  prove it wrong, plus the graded record of every past forecast, misses included.

Every one of these is listed in
https://rift.news/sitemap-systems.xml

## What this is not

Rift is a monitoring and situational-awareness tool that
aggregates official sources. It is not an official alerting service and is not
a substitute for one. For a warning that affects a person directly, the
instruction of their national warning centre and local emergency services is
the authority, and it is linked from the event.

Contact: support@rift.news