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D3.js · Canvas · Philippines · 2024

Ring
of Fire

18,139 earthquakes.
One archipelago.
One year.

By Ryan Liwag · Data: PHIVOLCS

The Philippines is a nation of 7,641 islands. It is also a nation perched on the Pacific Ring of Fire — a 40,000-kilometer arc of fault lines and volcanoes encircling the Pacific Ocean. While the news fixates on "The Big One," a singular catastrophic event, the real story of our seismicity is more constant, more intricate, and more human.

This is a portrait of 2024 — every recorded earthquake, mapped, sorted, and brought to life. Not a warning. A reckoning with what is already here.

01

A Nation in Constant Motion

Each point is one of 18,139 earthquakes recorded by PHIVOLCS in 2024 — roughly 50 per day, every day of the year. This is not an anomaly. This is the Philippines.

02

18,139 Events. One Year.

Arranged as a grid, the sheer count becomes undeniable. The Philippines sits at the convergence of four tectonic plates — Pacific, Philippine Sea, Eurasian, and Indo-Australian. No other nation sits on so many active fault lines simultaneously.

03

The Silent 80%

Sorted by magnitude, the picture splits sharply. More than 14,000 events — shown in grey — were magnitude 3.0 or below. Micro-tremors. The earth's background hum. Most Filipinos never felt them.

04

The Events That Matter

These are the 3,500+ earthquakes of magnitude 3.0 and above — the ones that rattle dishes, break sleep, and occasionally break buildings. Circle size scales with magnitude: each unit increase represents a 32-fold jump in energy released.

05

Where the Earth Breaks

Mapped to geography, the fault lines reveal themselves. Mindanao bears the heaviest load — straddling the Philippine Trench and the Cotabato Fault. Eastern Visayas and Southern Luzon follow. The hotspots are predictable. The timing, never.

Philippines Earthquakes 2024 — PHIVOLCS

Source: PHIVOLCS

What this means

Preparedness isn't a plan.
It's a culture.

18,139 Total earthquakes, 2024
~80% Below magnitude 3.0 — imperceptible
6.2 Largest event — June, off Davao Occidental
50/day Average daily seismic events

For Filipinos, earthquakes are not an emergency — they are a fact of daily life. The 18,139 events of 2024 are not an anomaly. They are the baseline. Our preparedness cannot be a panicked reaction to a headline; it must be a national culture of constant readiness, woven into how we build, how we teach, and how we live.

Data: Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (PHIVOLCS), 2024 full catalog. 18,139 events visualised. Story built with Svelte, D3.js, HTML Canvas.

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