Volcanoes of the World

Seventy kilometres from Mexico City, El Popo has been in near-continuous dome growth and ash emission since 1994. Tens of millions of people live inside its potential ashfall footprint, which makes even modest explosions a civil-protection event.

Holds one of the few long-lived lava lakes on Earth. Its lava is unusually fluid, so when the crater wall fails it runs downhill at road speed: in 2021 flows reached the outskirts of Goma, a city of around two million.

Europe's largest and most persistently active volcano, in near-continuous summit activity for decades. Its paroxysms throw ash over Catania and repeatedly close the city's airport; flank fissures threaten the towns built on its slopes.

One of Kamchatka's largest and most restless volcanoes, with a growing lava dome that collapses into pyroclastic flows. Its ash plumes reach aviation altitudes over the North Pacific, and Tokyo VAAC advisories for it appear on this site's ash layer.

Indonesia's most active volcano, looming over Yogyakarta. Its hazard is the nuee ardente — dense pyroclastic flows that race down the flanks faster than anyone can outrun; the 2010 eruption killed more than 350 people.

Famous for a cone so symmetrical it is used as a textbook illustration, and the most active volcano in the Philippines. Its eruptions send lava and pyroclastic flows down well-worn channels, and Tokyo VAAC issues ash advisories for it.

One of the most active volcanoes on Earth and among the most densely instrumented. The 2018 lower Puna eruption destroyed some 700 homes; the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory records its summit seismicity down to magnitudes most networks never see.

The Sakurajima cone inside the Aira caldera is among the busiest volcanoes anywhere, erupting hundreds of times a year and dusting Kagoshima with ash. Tokyo VAAC issues advisories for it almost daily, and they appear on this site's ash layer.

A volcano within a lake within a caldera, an hour south of Manila. Water and magma meeting makes its eruptions violently explosive: the 2020 blast threw ash over the capital and displaced hundreds of thousands of people.

New Zealand's most active cone volcano, an island that is mostly submerged crater. A sudden steam-driven eruption in December 2019 killed 22 people who were visiting the crater floor, with almost no precursory warning.

The 1883 eruption was heard nearly 5,000 km away and its tsunamis killed tens of thousands. The cone that grew in its place, Anak Krakatau, collapsed into the sea in 2018, generating a tsunami that struck the Sunda Strait without warning.

Dormant for some 6,000 years until 2021, when the Reykjanes peninsula reawakened. Each eruption has been announced weeks in advance by dense swarms of small earthquakes as magma forced its way through the crust — the textbook case this site's swarm detector is built around.

The largest active volcano on Earth by volume, a shield so broad its slopes are easy to mistake for ordinary terrain. It woke in late 2022 after 38 years of quiet, sending lava flows toward the saddle road across the island.

The 1991 eruption was the second largest of the twentieth century, and one of the few great eruptions successfully forecast: monitoring allowed mass evacuation days ahead. Its stratospheric aerosol cooled global temperatures by about half a degree.

The 2010 eruption was modest in volume but met glacial meltwater, shattering magma into fine ash that a steady jet stream carried over Europe. Airspace closures grounded roughly 100,000 flights and made ash advisories a household subject.

On 18 May 1980 an earthquake triggered the largest landslide in recorded history, uncorking a lateral blast that flattened forest for 30 km and killed 57 people — the deadliest eruption in United States history.

The 1815 eruption was the largest in recorded history. Sulphate aerosols reached the stratosphere and cooled the planet enough that 1816 became the year without a summer, with crop failure and famine as far away as New England and Europe.

The Late Bronze Age eruption emptied a magma chamber and left the caldera that today's islands ring. An intense earthquake swarm in early 2025 put the island under a state of emergency, a reminder that the system is far from extinct.

The eruption of 79 AD buried Pompeii and Herculaneum under metres of pumice and ash. Vesuvius has been quiet since 1944, but roughly three million people now live within the zone its pyroclastic flows could reach.

Buried under the Myrdalsjokull ice cap, Katla's danger is water as much as magma: an eruption melts ice into a jokulhlaup, a glacial outburst flood capable of carrying icebergs across the coastal plain within hours.

Japan's highest peak sits where three tectonic plates meet. The Hoei eruption of 1707 dropped ash on Edo, 100 km away, and opened a crater still visible on the southeast flank; the volcano has been quiet ever since.

A caldera beneath the western suburbs of Naples rather than a cone. Slow ground uplift known as bradyseism, accompanied by earthquake swarms, has raised the town of Pozzuoli by several metres since the 1970s and continues today.