HazardSim: Disaster Simulator

HazardSim puts six natural disasters on a real map of the real world — your city, your street, the place you grew up.

Pick a spot, set the strength, and watch what happens. The simulation runs on real terrain, real coastlines and real building footprints, so the answer is specific to the place you chose, not a generic animation.

SIX HAZARDS

• Earthquake — buildings shake and collapse in 3D, dust rolls through the streets, the ground tears open. Shaking intensity is mapped around the epicentre.
• Volcano — an eruption column, lava running down the actual slopes of the mountain, ash carried by the real wind at altitude.
• Tsunami — the sea draws back, then a wave runs inland exactly as far as the terrain allows.
• Meteor impact — crater, fireball, blast rings, sized from the rock you choose.
• Hurricane — wind field, storm surge and the coastline it reaches.
• Sea level rise — what goes under water, metre by metre.

WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT

Real elevation data, not a flat map. A tsunami stops where a hill stops it. Lava follows the steepest way downhill. Ash blows the way the wind is actually blowing today.

Real cities. The earthquake knows where the buildings are and how many people live around them, so the casualty estimate changes when you move the epicentre a kilometre.

Honest numbers. Every figure comes from published research and the method is explained on the site. Where a number is a rough estimate, it says so.

A catalogue of 1560 real volcanoes, searchable by name in any language, each opening at the eruption size typical for that volcano — with the slider still yours to override.

16 LANGUAGES

English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Turkish, Indonesian, Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Hindi, Arabic.

NOT A FORECAST

HazardSim is a teaching and curiosity tool, not an emergency planning system. It answers "what would this look like here", not "what will happen". Real disasters depend on the shape of the seafloor, the fault that moved, the hour of day and whether people evacuated. Casualty figures assume nobody did, which never happens in reality.

Free and no accounts.