Live planet
Real-time maps of planes, ships, storms, lightning, earthquakes and forests. 8 resources; API, key, license and embedding quoted from each site's own pages, checked Oct 23, 2026.
USGS Latest Earthquakes
Every quake on Earth large enough to register appears within minutes, and the whole historical catalog is searchable by place, date and magnitude.
LiveAPI, no keyDownloadCommercial OK
Zoom Earth
You can scrub back through the last day of satellite frames and watch a cyclone spin up or wildfire smoke drift across a continent.
LiveNon-commercial
Flightradar24
Click any dot in the sky to see the plane, its route and its altitude, fed by more than 50,000 ground receivers run largely by enthusiasts.
LiveAPI (paid)License unclear
MarineTraffic
Zoom into any strait or harbour and see the tankers, ferries and fishing boats moving through it right now.
LiveAPI (paid)License unclear
Windy
Wind is drawn as flowing particles across the whole globe, so you can watch weather systems move and compare forecast models side by side.
LiveAPICommercial: conditions
LightningMaps.org
Strikes pop up on the map within seconds, and you can watch thunderstorms cross a country, all detected by hobbyists' antennas.
LiveCommercial: conditions
Global Forest Watch
Near-real-time satellite alerts let you see where forest is being cleared this week, down to individual patches.
ChangedLiveAPIDownloadCommercial: conditions
Submarine Cable Map
It shows how the internet physically crosses oceans, and which coastal towns your traffic actually passes through.
License unclear
Side by side
| Resource | API | Key | Data download | Commercial use | Embed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| USGS Latest Earthquakes The US government's live map and catalog of earthquakes worldwide, with minute-by-minute GeoJSON feeds and a searchable query API. |
Official API · Free | No | Yes (geojson, csv, kml, quakeml) | Commercial use OK | Embedding unclear |
| Zoom Earth A browser map of the whole planet that layers near-live weather satellite pictures, rain radar, model forecasts, storm tracks and active fires. |
No official API | — | — | Non-commercial only | Embedding unclear |
| Flightradar24 A live world map of aircraft in flight, built from a crowd-hosted network of ADS-B receivers plus other tracking sources, with airport, airline and aircraft pages. |
Official API · Paid | Yes | — | Commercial use unclear | Embedding unclear |
| MarineTraffic A live map of ships worldwide built from AIS position signals, with vessel details, port calls and voyage history. |
Official API · Paid | Yes | — | Commercial use unclear | Embedding unclear |
| Windy An animated world weather map showing wind, rain, temperature, waves and more from several forecast models, plus official APIs for point forecasts, embeddable forecast maps and webcams. |
Official API · Free tier | Yes | — | Commercial use with conditions | Embedding with conditions |
| LightningMaps.org A real-time map of lightning strikes located by a volunteer network of home-built radio receivers run by the Blitzortung.org community. |
No official API | — | — | Commercial use with conditions | No embedding |
| Global Forest Watch WRI's map and data platform for tracking forest loss, deforestation alerts and land use worldwide from satellite data, with a public Data API; globalforestwatch.org now redirects to Global Nature Watch. |
Official API · Free | Yes | Yes (json, csv, geotiff, shp, gpkg) | Commercial use with conditions | Embedding unclear |
| Submarine Cable Map An interactive world map of the undersea fibre-optic cables and their landing stations, with owners, length and ready-for-service year for each system. |
No official API | — | — | Commercial use unclear | No embedding |