Question 1

What is Rift?

Accepted Answer

A real-time global threat monitor. It collects warnings and event reports from official sources such as USGS, NOAA, MeteoAlarm, GDACS and NASA, scores them on one severity scale, and draws them on a single live world map covering earthquakes, severe weather, wildfires, volcanoes, tsunamis, armed conflict, infrastructure failure and space weather.

Question 2

Is Rift free?

Accepted Answer

Yes. The map, the country pages, the status page and the public API are all free to use and no sign-up is required. It is non-commercial: no ads and no paid plans, only voluntary donations.

Question 3

Where does the data come from?

Accepted Answer

From the warning centres and agencies themselves, not from another aggregator. Every source is listed by name on the terms and data attribution page, and each event on the map links back to the bulletin it came from so a reader can check it at the source.

Question 4

How often is the data updated?

Accepted Answer

Continuously, on the schedule of each feed rather than one fixed interval: a seismic feed is polled in minutes, a slower catalogue in hours. Every feed has a freshness budget and is checked against it, and the current state of all of them is published on the status page.

Question 5

What happens when one of the sources goes down?

Accepted Answer

It is shown as down. A feed that fails is never rendered as a quiet world: the affected panel says that data is missing and why, rather than showing a zero that reads as an all-clear. That rule is enforced by tests, not by convention.

Question 6

How is this different from a news site?

Accepted Answer

A news site reports events after an editor decides they are newsworthy. This reads the same official warning feeds that reporters read, as they publish, and shows all of them on one map whether or not anyone has written an article yet.

Question 7

Can an AI assistant use Rift?

Accepted Answer

Yes. The site publishes a public JSON API under /api/v1/ that needs no key, an llms.txt describing what is available and where, and an OpenAPI 3.1 description at /api/v1/openapi.json generated from the server route table so it cannot describe an endpoint that is not served.

Question 8

Does it cover my country?

Accepted Answer

Global coverage for events, and there are dedicated pages for about 80 countries with their current threat reading, energy mix and active events. Coverage depth varies by source: seismic and weather data are genuinely global, while some national warning feeds only publish for their own territory.

Question 9

Should I rely on this instead of official warnings?

Accepted Answer

No. It is a monitoring and situational-awareness tool that aggregates official sources, not a substitute for them. For a warning that affects you, follow the instructions of your national warning centre and emergency services, which are linked from every event.

Rift - Real-Time Global Threat Monitor

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