Tap a dot for its status. Red is erupting, orange and yellow are on alert. Drag the time bar back to replay the eruptions
magma-watch [activity|volcano|explore|more] volcanoFive steps from a coloured dot to knowing who says that volcano is erupting.
Every dot is a volcano. Red is erupting, orange (Watch) and yellow (Advisory) are on alert, blue erupted in the last ten years and grey is quiet. Rings are the earthquakes of the past week.
Tap a dot, type a name or a country, or press Near me. The Volcano tab shows its size, what each observatory says, the latest USGS update and the earthquakes within 30 km. The bookmark saves it.
Every source is listed with its own words and its age. Red needs only one: a continuing eruption in the Smithsonian list, an open NASA event, USGS at WARNING or GeoNet at level 3 or more.
Press Replay or drag the time bar back. The map then shows every eruption of the record since 1960 that was under way in that month, coloured and sized by VEI. Tap an eruption in a volcano's list to jump to its month.
In Explore filter by status, kind of volcano, biggest eruption or region. Copy link shares the volcano and the month; the csv files hold the active volcanoes or all 1,214.
What a dot says about today:
The Volcanic Explosivity Index; each step is about ten times more material:
USGS names four levels, with an aviation colour next to each:
A map of public data, not a warning service.
Roughly 50 to 70 volcanoes erupt in a typical year, and a few dozen are in some stage of eruption on any given day. Nobody publishes one official list of them: each country's observatory reports its own volcanoes in its own words, and the global catalogue is kept by the Smithsonian. This page puts the open sources on one map and shows you which of them says what.
1,214 volcanoes, each coloured by its state today: red erupting, orange Watch, yellow Advisory, blue active lately, grey quiet.
Open a volcano and see every source with its own wording and its age, not just a colour.
The past week of USGS earthquakes on the map, and the count within 30 km of each volcano.
Drag the time bar and the map shows 66 years of eruptions, coloured and sized by VEI.
How explosive each volcano's biggest eruption was, from gentle lava to Tambora.
Your browser fetches the feeds directly. Nothing goes through a server of mine and nothing about you is uploaded.
A volcano is shown as erupting when at least one of four sources says so. The Smithsonian Global Volcanism Program lists 38 eruptions as continuing in the saved catalogue of October 2026. NASA's EONET lists volcanoes with an open eruption event, taken from the weekly Smithsonian and USGS reports. The USGS Volcano Hazards Program publishes an alert level for each volcano it watches in the United States, and GeoNet does the same for the New Zealand volcanoes. A USGS level of WARNING, or a GeoNet level of 3 or more, counts as an eruption.
| Colour | What it means | Which source |
|---|---|---|
| Red | Erupting now | Smithsonian continuing eruption, NASA open event, USGS WARNING, GeoNet level 3 to 5 |
| Orange | Watch: heightened unrest | USGS WATCH, GeoNet level 2 |
| Yellow | Advisory: signs of unrest | USGS ADVISORY, GeoNet level 1 |
| Blue | Erupted in the last ten years | Last eruption in the Smithsonian catalogue |
| Grey | Nothing recent | No source lists activity |
The highest state wins, and the volcano page lists every source behind it, newest first. Smithsonian's "continuing" counts as an eruption only while the saved list is less than 120 days old; after that it is shown as a note, because a list that old cannot say what is happening today.
The catalogue of 1,214 volcanoes and their eruptions comes from the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program (Volcanoes of the World, Holocene volcanoes). It is saved with this page as of October 2026: names, positions, heights, kind of volcano, the biggest eruption on record and the 2,248 eruptions since 1960. The live part is fetched by your browser when the page opens and again every ten minutes, straight from the source:
| Source | What it adds |
|---|---|
| USGS Volcano Hazards Program (HANS) | Alert level and aviation colour for the US volcanoes, and the text of the latest notice |
| GeoNet, GNS Science | Volcanic alert level 0 to 5 for the New Zealand volcanoes, with activity and hazard text |
| NASA EONET | Volcanoes with an open eruption event worldwide |
| USGS earthquake feeds | All earthquakes of the last 7 days of magnitude 2.5 or 1.0 and up |
| Esri | The map tiles |
Each feed can fail on its own. When one does, the page says so under More, in Live data, and keeps working with the others. Most countries do not publish an open alert level at all, so for most of the world the colour rests on the Smithsonian and NASA lists alone, which are updated weekly rather than hourly.
The Volcanic Explosivity Index runs from 0 to 8 and is roughly logarithmic: each step means about ten times more erupted material. It measures the size of the explosion, not the damage; a small eruption in a crowded valley can kill more people than a large one in the ocean. The size shown for a volcano is the biggest eruption on record, not what is happening now.
| VEI | Description | Material | Typical frequency | Example |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | Effusive | under 10,000 m³ | constant | lava flows, lava lakes |
| 1 | Gentle | over 10,000 m³ | daily | small explosions |
| 2 | Explosive | over 1 million m³ | weekly | Stromboli |
| 3 | Severe | over 10 million m³ | yearly | Nevado del Ruiz 1985 |
| 4 | Cataclysmic | over 0.1 km³ | every decade or so | Eyjafjallajökull 2010 |
| 5 | Paroxysmal | over 1 km³ | every 50 years or so | Mount St. Helens 1980 |
| 6 | Colossal | over 10 km³ | every century or so | Pinatubo 1991 |
| 7 | Super-colossal | over 100 km³ | every thousand years or so | Tambora 1815 |
| 8 | Mega-colossal | over 1,000 km³ | every 10,000 years or so | Toba, about 74,000 years ago |
The time bar at the bottom of the map runs from 1960 to today, one step per month. Drag it back and the live colours give way to the eruptions that were under way in the chosen month, coloured and sized by VEI; a ripple marks one that began that month. The histogram behind the slider counts the eruptions that began in each year, with the big ones (VEI 4 and up) in a brighter colour, so the busy years stand out at a glance. Space plays it, the arrow keys step a month and Shift steps a year.
Eruptions in the Smithsonian record that have a start date but no end date are shown for their first month only, because the record does not say how long they lasted. Eruptions that are still listed as continuing are shown from their start to today. The replay is a view of the catalogue, so it only knows what was reported; the older the eruption, the less likely a small one was recorded.
Observatories do not use the same scale. USGS uses four words for the ground: NORMAL, ADVISORY, WATCH and WARNING, plus a separate aviation colour code (green, yellow, orange, red) that tells pilots whether ash is a danger. GeoNet uses six levels: 0 no unrest, 1 minor unrest, 2 moderate to heightened unrest, 3 a minor eruption, 4 a moderate eruption and 5 a major eruption. Other countries use their own systems, and most of them are not published as open data. This page maps USGS and GeoNet onto its colours as the table above shows and says which source a colour comes from.
A grey dot means that none of the sources used here lists activity. It does not mean the volcano is safe. Volcanoes that have not erupted for centuries can restart, many have no instruments at all, and the feeds run behind: a Smithsonian report covers a week, and an alert level changes only when the observatory decides to change it. The page also shows Active lately in blue for volcanoes with an eruption in the last ten years, because those are the most likely to erupt again.
Treat the map as a way to find out what is going on, not as a warning. For anything that affects you (a trip, a flight, a home near a volcano) follow the local volcano observatory and your civil protection, and the aviation advisories for ash.
The map runs in your browser. Near me asks your browser for your location and uses it only on this page, to list the volcanoes closest to you; the position is not sent anywhere. The live feeds are fetched from USGS, GeoNet and NASA and the map tiles from Esri, so those services see your address as for any web page. Your saved volcanoes, the last few you opened and your settings stay in this browser's local storage under the keys mw-favs, mw-recent, mw-ui and mw-unit; Clear saved data under More removes them. The page uses cookie-free analytics (Simple Analytics) and no advertising.
Earthquakes, tsunamis, fires and the aurora are on the same kind of map. There are more tools in the full list.