About this service

Displays GVP Holocene volcano metadata and eruption history. Wikipedia links are generated from Wikidata P1886 mappings.

Volcano Map is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, the Smithsonian Institution, the U.S. Geological Survey or the Wikimedia Foundation.

Every page is generated ahead of time from a fixed snapshot of the source data. While you browse, this site does not call the Global Volcanism Program, Wikidata or Wikipedia. Only three things load live: the base map tiles, the photograph on each volcano page (from Wikimedia Commons or GVP), and a cookie-free visit counter.

• Volcano and eruption records come from the Smithsonian GVP web feature service, from its Holocene Volcanoes and Holocene Eruptions layers.
• Wikipedia articles are matched through the Wikidata property for GVP volcano number (P1886) rather than by name, and each summary is fetched from the Wikipedia REST API in that language.
• GVP's free-text fields (volcano type, region, country, tectonic setting, landform, major rock type) are folded into a fixed set of keys so they can be filtered and translated. A value we have not mapped yet is never guessed: a type shows as "Unknown", a region as "Other" (and is left out of the region lists), a country keeps GVP's English name, and a tectonic setting, landform or rock type is simply not shown. Eruptions are graded by how their start date was determined.
• The Recent Eruptions list is ours, not GVP's. It shows volcanoes with an eruption that started on or after 1 January 2024 and does not claim they are still erupting, so it can differ from GVP's Current Eruptions page.

The records are GVP's. This is what the site builds on top of them:

• Names in six languages. Each volcano's name is picked from Wikidata in a fixed order (label, alias, local-language name, English label) and falls back to GVP's own name; a few are corrected by hand.
• Translated categories. GVP's volcano type labels are grouped into 16 types, tectonic settings are split into setting and crust, and countries are translated through their ISO codes.
• Evidence grades. Every eruption gets one of four grades from how its start date was determined, shown as a badge.
• Eruption chart. A volcano's record is grouped into 10 to 30 time buckets, each showing the number of eruptions and the largest VEI.
• Nearby volcanoes. Each page lists the six closest volcanoes by great-circle distance.
• Plate boundaries. The PB2002 model is classified segment by segment (convergent, divergent, transform) rather than one class per boundary. With one class per boundary, 104 of its 241 boundaries would be wrong for more than a quarter of their length.
• Glossary. The explanations of VEI, evidence grades, plate boundaries and volcano types are written for this site in all six languages.

What we do not change: GVP's records are shown as published, its geological summaries stay in the original English, and Wikipedia summaries appear as written, with a link to the article.

The data belongs to the organisations below. Every volcano page links back to its GVP record and, where one exists, its Wikipedia article.

• Smithsonian Institution, Global Volcanism ProgramVolcano records and eruption history. Used for reference.
• WikidataVolcano matching (P1886), names in each language, Wikipedia links and photo references. CC0.
• WikipediaArticle summaries in each language. CC BY-SA.
• Wikimedia CommonsVolcano photographs. Each photo is credited with its author and licence right below the image; files that cannot be credited that way are not shown.
• PB2002 (Bird, 2003)Plate boundaries: Peter Bird (2003), An updated digital model of plate boundaries, Geochem. Geophys. Geosyst. 4(3), 1027. GIS data prepared by Hugo Ahlenius, Nordpil. ODC-BY 1.0.
• OpenStreetMap contributors / OpenFreeMapBase map tiles served by OpenFreeMap. ODbL.

Cite the volcano data as: Global Volcanism Program, 2025. [Database] Volcanoes of the World (v. 5.3). Distributed by Smithsonian Institution, compiled by Venzke, E. https://doi.org/10.5479/si.GVP.VOTW5-2025.5.3 Accessed 2026-09-21.

Data is refreshed periodically, not in real time, and is meant as a reference layer. Never use this service as the basis for disaster response or travel decisions.

This service is reference-only. For real-time volcano status, consult official monitoring agencies:

• USGS Volcano Hazards Program — Volcano UpdatesUS-focused, authoritative real-time alerts
• GVP Current EruptionsGlobal ongoing-eruption list maintained by GVP

Source data is collected again on a regular schedule, normally weekly, and each rebuild is reviewed before it is published, so the site can lag behind the sources by a week or more. The date and counts below come from the build you are looking at.