QuakeStation

A real-time earthquake, volcano and topography tracker for Android, built around a custom 3D OpenGL globe. Pulls live event data from the USGS FDSNWS catalog, detects swarms, animates magnitude-scaled ripples on the sphere, and lets you replay the last 24 h / 7 d / 30 d as a time-lapse over the globe.

Features Earth & data Cinematic 3D globe — custom OpenGL ES 2.0 renderer, eased camera, two- light shading (fixed view light + real-time UTC subsolar overlay for a subtle day/night terminator), star field, atmosphere rim glow. Live earthquake data — USGS FDSNWS Event API, with a Room cache so the app loads instantly when offline. Background sync via WorkManager. Swarm detection — greedy 200 km / 48 h clustering (DetectSwarmsUseCase), rendered as radial "spines" that grow taller with more events. Tap a spine for a sortable (by magnitude or by time) scrollable event list. Replay — hit ▶ in the header to play back every quake in your selected time window in chronological order, ~1.5 s per quake. Markers reveal cumulatively; the camera flies to each new event. Geo overlays Tectonic plates — PB2002 (Bird 2003) plate boundaries. Seismic Activity — a dual-layer heatmap with an explicit corner legend. Warm layer (yellow → orange → red) is the static plate- boundary proximity proxy: where significant quakes cluster geologically. Cool layer (blue → cyan → white) is computed live from the actual M5+ events you've fetched (last 30 days), so you can see baseline risk corridors and what's actually been moving in one frame. Both layers share the same 720×360 grid layout and sphere UVs, so they overlay pixel-perfect. Active volcanoes — ~70 globally significant Holocene volcanoes from the Smithsonian GVP, rendered as small 3D orange cones with per-face shading. Tap for a card with name / country / type / elevation / last eruption year. A "most recent eruption" pill surfaces alongside the LATEST/BIGGEST quake pill in the header. Major peaks — ~60 iconic mountains: the Seven Summits, the 14 eight-thousanders, plus famous peaks per continent. White triangle markers, tap for range / elevation / prominence. Equator reference line — thin cyan latitude-0 circle for orientation. Star field, continent outlines, auto-rotate, marker colour mode (depth vs magnitude) — all toggleable. Interactions & UX Tap to focus — markers, swarm spines, volcanoes, peaks, or the LATEST/BIGGEST header pill all fly the camera to the target and show a bottom card with details. Notifications — set a magnitude threshold; periodic background sync fires a system notification for any new event above it. Settings — magnitude floor, time range, depth filter, distance units, marker colour mode, sync interval, and toggles for every visual layer.