The Ocean

Seventy percent of the planet, always moving. Here's the water — its rise and fall, its waves, and its sound — in real time.

The Whole Ocean

Seventy percent of the planet is a single connected body of water, never still. Here it is from space — its surface set in motion by the great currents that carry heat around the world, with the past week's largest earthquakes pinned where the ground moved, most of them out along the seams in the seafloor. Drag to spin; switch layers to read the sea's temperature, its plankton blooms, or dive to the floor.

One Ocean

NASA OSCAR · surface currents
Earthquake (size = magnitude) Deep / trench Shipwreck Anomaly

Surface currents from NASA's OSCAR model, drawn as flowing streamlines over a fully-lit Earth — no day/night here, so the focus stays on the water. Switch to sea-surface temperature, chlorophyll, or the shaded-relief seafloor; the week's largest quakes stay pinned on every view. Flip on Deep Points to trade the live quakes for a curated tour of the seafloor — famous trenches, shipwrecks, and oddities, each one clickable. Hover for coordinates; click a pin for details.

The Tide

The Moon and Sun pull the ocean into a slow daily breath. Here's the predicted curve for a tide station near you — where the water is now, and when the next high and low arrive. Hover the curve to read the height at any moment.

San Francisco

NOAA CO-OPS · loading…

Predicted heights above MLLW (mean lower low water), from NOAA's harmonic tide model. The dashed line is now; dots mark the highs and lows.

About this tide

Tide predictions come from NOAA's Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services (CO-OPS), computed from decades of harmonic analysis at each station. Times are shown in your browser's local time, so they line up best when you're near the station you've picked.

The Buoys

Scattered along the coasts and far out in the open sea, NOAA's weather buoys ride the swell and report what the water is doing — how big the waves are, how warm the sea is, how hard the wind blows. Pick one and read its latest.

San Francisco

NDBC · loading…

Live observations from NOAA's National Data Buoy Center, updated about hourly. Wave height is the significant height — the average of the largest third of waves. A dash means that sensor isn't reporting.

Listen

Drop a microphone into the sea and this is what you hear — the hum of boats, the snap and crackle of shrimp, and, if you're lucky, the calls of orcas. These are live hydrophones in the Salish Sea off Washington State, run by the Orcasound community. Headphones help.

Live hydrophone

Orcasound · loading…
Pick a hydrophone
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Audio from the Orcasound hydrophone network (CC BY-NC-SA). When a node is broadcasting you'll hear it live; otherwise you'll get its most recent recording. Some nodes go quiet between deployments.

The Tsunami Watch

A tsunami is born when the seafloor lurches — almost always a big undersea earthquake. NOAA watches for it with deep-ocean pressure sensors and issues the warnings. Here's the current alert status for U.S. coasts, and the largest recent quakes under the sea.

Alert status

NWS + USGS · loading…

    Largest recent quakes under the ocean

      About this watch

      Alerts come from the U.S. National Weather Service / NOAA Tsunami Warning Centers; the earthquake list is the USGS real-time feed (magnitude 4.5+ over the past week, ranked by size). Most large undersea quakes do not generate a destructive tsunami — the warning centers evaluate each one within minutes using DART deep-ocean buoys and coastal tide gauges.