Every Significant Volcanic Eruption

900 eruptions since 4360 BC

Every eruption in NOAA’s significant eruptions database, century by century, with its explosivity, deaths, damage and the tsunamis and earthquakes it set off.

Every significant eruption on the map

Colored by explosivity; the larger the dot, the more people it killed.

VEI 0
VEI 2
VEI 3
VEI 4
VEI 5
VEI 6
VEI 7+
VEI not recorded

Open the live map with volcanic ash advisories

By century

The record thickens as the written sources do; an empty century is one with no source, not one without eruptions.

The deadliest

The most recent

The Volcanic Explosivity Index

VEI	Description	Eruption column	How often	Example
0	Non-explosive	under 100 m	daily	Kilauea
1	Small	100 m to 1 km	daily	Stromboli
2	Moderate	1 to 5 km	weekly	Galeras, 1992
3	Moderate to large	3 to 15 km	yearly	Ruiz, 1985
4	Large	10 to 25 km	tens of years	Galunggung, 1982
5	Very large	over 25 km	hundreds of years	Mount St. Helens
6	Paroxysmal	over 25 km	hundreds of years	Krakatau, 1883
7	Colossal	over 25 km	thousands of years	Tambora, 1815
8	Colossal	over 25 km	tens of thousands of years	Yellowstone, 2 million years ago

Sources

Volcanoes and significant eruptions from NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, Global Historical Hazard Database, cited as NCEI/WDS, doi:10.7289/V5PN93H7. Public domain. Read 2026-09-24. Volcano numbers are the Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program’s.