Data sources

Everything in the World Live Events section comes from a public agency feed. The live cameras themselves are public YouTube streams published by their own broadcasters — TubeTraveler does not operate any camera.

Event feeds

USGS Earthquake Hazards Program

Enabled

Primary source for earthquakes. Provides the epicentre, magnitude, focal depth, origin time, felt reports and significance figure that appear on earthquake pages.

Target refresh: every 5 minutes
Last successful read: 2026-09-17 10:35 UTC (just now)
Provider site: earthquake.usgs.gov

Earthquake data courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

GDACS — Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System

Enabled

Primary alerting source for tropical cyclones, floods, volcanic activity, wildfires, droughts and tsunami risk. Provides the alert level that drives our severity rating, plus the list of countries an agency has flagged.

Target refresh: every 12 minutes
Last successful read: 2026-09-17 10:35 UTC (just now)
Provider site: www.gdacs.org

Alert data from GDACS, a joint initiative of the United Nations and the European Commission.

NASA EONET

Enabled

Supplementary satellite-based tracking. Fills gaps GDACS does not cover and supplies the track lines and affected-area outlines drawn on our maps. Rarely enough on its own to publish an event.

Target refresh: every 30 minutes
Last successful read: 2026-09-17 10:35 UTC (just now)
Provider site: eonet.gsfc.nasa.gov

Event tracking data from NASA EONET (Earth Observatory Natural Event Tracker).

ReliefWeb (UN OCHA)

Not enabledLink only — never creates an event

Link-only source. We use it to point at official situation reports — the publishing agency, report title and publication time — and never reproduce report text. ReliefWeb never creates an event on its own; it only attaches to an event another agency already reported.

Target refresh: every 45 minutes
Last successful read: Not yet recorded
Provider site: reliefweb.int

Situation reports via ReliefWeb, a service of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Ticketmaster Discovery API

Not enabled

Optional listings feed for public outdoor events. Heavily filtered to street festivals, parades, fireworks and countdowns, and never published without editorial review. Most festivals on TubeTraveler are entered by hand instead.

Target refresh: every 6 hours
Last successful read: Not yet recorded
Provider site: developer.ticketmaster.com

Event listing data from the Ticketmaster Discovery API.

Camera, map and weather data

Live video — public YouTube live streams, embedded through YouTube’s own player. All rights and broadcast responsibility remain with the original creators. YouTube is a trademark of Google LLC.
Camera locations, categories and descriptions — compiled and maintained by TubeTraveler. Coordinates that are still estimates are flagged internally and score lower in camera matching until an editor confirms them.
3D globe — rendered with the open-source CesiumJS engine. The default Natural Earth imagery is public domain and does not require an API key. At intermediate zoom it switches to Esri World Imagery, with Esri and contributing imagery-source attribution kept visible. At close-range zoom, it switches to OpenStreetMap tiles so roads and place names remain readable. Those tiles are loaded only for the user's current view, are never prefetched, and the required OpenStreetMap attribution remains visible. OpenStreetMap is also credited on specialist 2D event maps.
Local weather and sun times — Open-Meteo, plus astronomical calculations we run ourselves from the camera’s coordinates.

Commercial globe edition

The advertising-supported homepage uses a deliberately smaller set of layers than the upstream God's Eye View demonstration. A layer is available on the homepage only after its commercial-use terms, attribution and freshness display have been reviewed. Restricted datasets are represented below so they cannot be enabled accidentally by a future UI change.

Live cams

TubeTraveler camera catalog / YouTube

Active

Only active public streams already registered in TubeTraveler.

World events

USGS, GDACS, NASA EONET and TubeTraveler editorial

Active

Only non-sensitive events that pass the existing ads-safety gate.

Mid-range satellite imagery

Esri World Imagery

Active

Loaded only at intermediate zoom; Esri and contributing data-source attribution remains visible.

Close-range map detail

OpenStreetMap contributors

Active

Loaded only at close zoom, without prefetching; attribution remains visible on the globe.

Satellites

CelesTrak

Excluded

Planned. Attribution and freshness must remain visible.

Active fires

NASA FIRMS

Excluded

Planned. Requires a free FIRMS key and source timestamp.

OpenSky flights

OpenSky Network

Contract required

Never enable on the ad-supported site without written commercial terms.

Submarine cables

TeleGeography

Excluded

CC BY-NC-SA dataset; excluded from the commercial product.

Regional news

Google News RSS

Excluded

Excluded from the commercial product.

How current is any of this?

Each event page shows the timestamp of the last update we received from its source agencies, and each source card above shows when we last read that feed successfully. If a feed becomes unreachable, that source alone is paused and the rest of the site — including every live camera — continues to work normally. Nothing on TubeTraveler waits on an agency API at page load.

Corrections and takedowns

If an agency, broadcaster or reader believes something here is wrong or should not be shown, the corrections page explains how to reach us, and the editorial policy sets out what we will and will not publish. The methodology covers how the data is processed once we have it.