See the ground move.
LITHOS is an open source ground motion map that shows how the ground across Europe rises and sinks, to the millimetre, measured by radar satellites. Its anomaly engine flags the points where the motion changes.
The ground is never still.
Cities sink as groundwater is drawn down, coastlines subside and dams, railways and buildings deform years before anyone notices. Radar satellites have measured this for more than a decade, and the data is free.
The measurements sit behind specialist tools and large downloads. LITHOS puts them on a map anyone can read and points out what has changed.
What it reads.
- European Ground Motion Service
- Copernicus EGMS: processed Sentinel-1 radar interferometry over Europe, in rolling five year windows.
- COMET LiCSAR
- The global archive from the Centre for Observation and Modelling of Earthquakes, Volcanoes and Tectonics, read over the network.
How it works.
- Click a point
- Each point gives its velocity in millimetres a year, its full history and one plain sentence about its behaviour.
- Draw an area
- An area gives totals, a count of anomalous points and a callout for any new bowl of subsidence or uplift forming inside it.
- Find the change
- The anomaly engine looks for acceleration, change points with their onset date and emerging clusters, and separates seasonal swings from long-term motion. Points with low coherence are not over-flagged.
- Share it
- Every view has a permanent link. Maps export as PNG, time series as CSV and areas as GeoJSON, and an open API serves the same results.
In figures.
- mm
- Ground motion measured to the millimetre
- Apache 2.0
- Open source licence
Observed motion, stated plainly.
LITHOS measures how dry land rises and sinks. It reports what has been observed and flags what has changed. It does not predict when a structure fails, and it does not cover water, the seabed or offshore areas.
Coverage is shown as it is. Across the EU, Norway, the United Kingdom and Iceland the data is dense and measured to the millimetre in rolling five year windows. Along the tectonic and volcanic belts of the world it is strong but uneven. Where there is no data, the map says so.
Who it serves.
- Engineers and operators of railways, dams and buildings.
- Planners, insurers and geologists assessing ground risk.
- Journalists and researchers checking whether a place is moving.
