About

NASA EONET only includes events that have been reviewed and tagged by a human curator. Small or local events — most prescribed burns, minor quakes below magnitude 2.5, weather that hasn't escalated — won't be here. EONET also occasionally lags behind the news.

Wildfires below 1,000 acres are also filtered out at the application level so the globe doesn't fill with dots from the U.S. prescribed-burn calendar. Untoggle a category in the bottom bar to see what's actually tracked.

The basemap is rendered at roughly 70% brightness and 80% saturation relative to the NASA original. This is deliberate — it lets event markers stand out without competing with continents and cloud cover.

• USGS earthquakes — every 5 minutes.
• NASA EONET events — every 10 minutes.
• NOAA SWPC planetary K-index — every 15 minutes (the underlying reading itself updates every 3 hours).
• Local weather (Open-Meteo) — every 15 minutes.
• IP geolocation — once per session, then cached in your browser for 6 hours.
• Basemap — once per page open.

No data is fetched in the background after you close the tab.

A geomagnetic storm. NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center publishes a planetary K-index on a 0–9 scale; when it crosses Kp 5 (the G1 threshold) the auroral oval drops far enough toward the equator that it's worth showing on a globe view. The cap fades from violet at the pole to transparent at the storm's equatorward boundary — a stronger storm pushes the boundary further down, so the cap visibly grows. A chip in the bottom rail shows the G-scale (G1–G5) and the raw Kp value while a storm is active. Below Kp 5 nothing renders and the chip disappears.

The boundary's position on the globe is exaggerated for legibility: at the textbook auroral-oval latitudes the difference between G1 and G5 reads as nearly the same small ring around the pole. The visible cadence here is doubled (10° of latitude per Kp step instead of 5°) so weak and severe storms are unmistakably distinct. The chip's exact Kp number remains the source of truth.

A grounding cue. Without it, the globe is a planet; with it, the planet has you on it. The chip combines three sources:

• Location — IP-based geolocation via ipwho.is (cached in your browser for 6 hours), with get.geojs.io as a fallback if the primary is unreachable. City, region, country, timezone, and approximate coordinates only — no IP is stored.
• Time — your device's clock, formatted in the timezone returned by the geolocation lookup, so a traveler sees the local civil time rather than their device's home time.
• Weather — current temperature, today's high and low, and a one-word condition from Open-Meteo, refreshed every 15 minutes. Imperial units in the United States, metric elsewhere.

On narrow viewports the weather row collapses; on the smallest phones the chip hides entirely so the globe and event count stay the visual focus.

No analytics. No cookies. No accounts. Filter selections are stored in your browser's local storage so they persist across visits — that data never leaves your device.

No analytics, no advertising, no accounts, and no app-side tracking of any kind. The app does request data from public sources to show you the globe, your local time, and current conditions:

• USGS, NASA EONET, NASA GIBS, NOAA SWPC. Anonymous read-only fetches of the public data feeds described under "Data sources" above. These services see only that some client requested public data — no name, account, or device identifier accompanies the request.
• ipwho.is and get.geojs.io. Your IP address reaches these third-party services when GeoStill resolves your approximate location for the time, city, and weather chip at the top. The result is cached on this device for six hours; your IP itself isn't stored or transmitted by GeoStill.
• Open-Meteo. The approximate coordinates from the geolocation step are sent to Open-Meteo to fetch current weather. No name, account, or device identifier accompanies the request.

Everything else — your filter selections, units preference, ambient state, and any pinned storms — lives in this app's own storage on this device. None of it leaves the device. There are no Apple servers, GeoStill servers, or analytics endpoints in the picture.

GeoStill does not request Location, Notifications, Camera, Photos, or any other iOS permission. The Live Activity for pinned severe storms uses an in-app refresh on the globe's existing EONET cycle — it is not a push notification and the system does not prompt you to allow it.

GeoStill is a one-time purchase from the App Store. No in-app purchases, no subscriptions, no tier-locked features, no ads — once you've bought it, every feature is yours and nothing inside the app ever asks for more money. The data the app draws on is publicly funded research.

Long-press an empty area of your Home Screen, tap the + in the top corner, search "GeoStill," and choose a size. The small and medium widgets sit on the Home Screen; the rectangular size is for the Lock Screen widget shelf. The count refreshes every fifteen minutes.

Try one of these out loud:

• "Hey Siri, show events in GeoStill"
• "Hey Siri, show wildfires in GeoStill"
• "Hey Siri, show earthquakes in GeoStill"
• "Hey Siri, show volcanoes in GeoStill"

The same actions appear in the Shortcuts app under Gallery → From Apps → GeoStill, where you can wire them into automations or Home Screen action buttons. No setup required.

When a named cyclone, hurricane, or typhoon is on the globe, open the event and tap Pin. iOS will display a small live tile on your Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island showing the storm's name, current coordinates, and how many observation points EONET has logged for the track. The tile updates alongside the globe's ten-minute EONET refresh and disappears when you unpin it or when EONET drops the storm from its feed. This is a glance-only surface — it doesn't push notifications and never wakes the phone.

Ambient mode is iPad-only. Open Settings (the gear in the top-right) and turn on Ambient mode. The header chip, gear, chip rail, footer, the system status bar, and the home indicator all hide so the globe is the only thing on screen, and the iPad won't sleep while you're in this mode. It's designed for stand-mounted or AirPlay-mirrored display.

To leave ambient mode, tap anywhere on the globe three times in quick succession. The chrome fades back in and the gear reappears.

Below M2.5 the globe fills with dots that nobody outside seismology finds meaningful. Above it, every marker reflects an event with at least some perceptibility somewhere. The line is drawn for visual calm rather than scientific completeness.

The two layers speak different visual languages on purpose. USGS quakes are short, sharp, point-in-time events — they get a brief expanding ring on first appearance, then settle to a dim dot. EONET events are ongoing situations measured over hours or days — they get a steady, slow breathing glow instead. One says "it just happened." The other says "this is still going on."

GeoStill is a static site. It has no backend, no API, no database.