Volcanoes
Volcanoes of the World Quiz
Vesuvius, Krakatoa, Mount St. Helens and 47 more: find 50 famous volcanoes on the map, name them in 10 minutes, or learn their great eruptions.
Every volcano is labelled. Tap or click one (or pick it from the list) to see its type, height, last eruption and its best-known eruption with its VEI. Zoom in to see every name.
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All volcanoes on this map
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Sources and notes
Heights are in metres and feet. Volcano heights, types, last eruptions and eruptions are from the Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program (GVP). Other mountains’ heights and first ascents are from official sources, each checked against at least one other; US summits use the US Geological Survey where it has a current figure. Where sources disagree, the mountain’s card says so.
VEI is the Volcanic Explosivity Index, from 0 (lava flowing out gently) to 8 (the largest known eruptions). Each step up means about ten times as much ash and rock thrown out. The VEIs are the GVP’s.
“Continuing” means the GVP listed the eruption as ongoing when we checked its records in September 2026.
Other names count: local names and old spellings (Chomolungma, Sagarmatha, Citlaltépetl, Mount McKinley, Mount Cook), and you can add or leave out “Mount”, “Mt” or “Volcano”.
Find on the map: we name a place, you click its marker (or, for a range, its area). Practice gives you three tries and highlights the right part of the map after two misses; Test gives you three tries without hints; Strict gives you one. After the last miss, the answer is shown and the next one comes up.
Where places are too close to tell apart at the zoom you are at (Everest and Lhotse, the Gasherbrums, the Cascades, the Big Island of Hawaiʻi), their markers step apart, with a thin line to the true summit. Zoom in and each marker moves back to its place.
The plate boundaries layer is Peter Bird’s 2003 model of the Earth’s plate boundaries, in Hugo Ahlenius’s (Nordpil) conversion, published under the Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0). Most of these volcanoes sit on or near a boundary; Hawaiʻi, Yellowstone and Réunion sit over hotspots instead.
Mountains are placed from their summit coordinates on a world map drawn from official map data.
Maps: official map data
Smithsonian Institution, Global Volcanism Program: Volcanoes of the World
Other heights and first ascents: official sources
Tectonic plate boundaries: Peter Bird (2003), converted by Hugo Ahlenius, Nordpil (ODC-BY 1.0)
About these 50 volcanoes
The list has the volcanoes behind history’s best-known eruptions (Vesuvius in 79 CE, Tambora in 1815, Krakatoa in 1883, Mount Pelée in 1902, Mount St. Helens in 1980, Pinatubo in 1991 and Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai in 2022), the ones that are almost always erupting, such as Stromboli, Etna, Kīlauea and Yasur, and famous mountains that are volcanoes too, from Mount Fuji to Ojos del Salado.
Turn on the plate boundaries and most of them line up along the edges of the Pacific, the Ring of Fire, or where plates pull apart in Iceland and East Africa. A few, such as those of Hawaiʻi and Yellowstone, sit over hotspots far from any boundary.
The largest eruptions on this map
- Toba about 74,000 years ago (Youngest Toba Tuff), VEI 8
- Yellowstone Caldera 631,000 years ago (Lava Creek eruption), VEI 8
- Santorini about 1610 BCE (the Minoan eruption), VEI 7
- Mount Tambora 1815, VEI 7
- Mount Pinatubo 1991, VEI 6
- Krakatoa 1883, VEI 6
VEI, the Volcanic Explosivity Index, runs from 0 to 8; each step is about ten times more ash and rock.