Holocene Volcanoes, Eruptions, and Eruption Events

Tidy snapshots of the Smithsonian Institution Global Volcanism Program's Volcanoes of the World database. Provides three data frames covering Holocene volcanoes, their eruptions, and the events recorded during those eruptions. The schema follows the layout popularized by the 'rfordatascience/tidytuesday' 2020-05-12 release, refreshed against the current Global Volcanism Program database.

volcanoes

An R data package wrapping a current (as of 2026-05-03) snapshot of the Smithsonian Institution Global Volcanism Program Volcanoes of the World database. The schema follows the layout popularized by the rfordatascience/tidytuesday 2020-05-12 release, refreshed against the latest GVP database version.

Installation

Install the released version from CRAN:

install.packages("volcanoes")

Or the development version from GitHub:

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("moderndive/volcanoes")

Datasets

Dataset	Rows (per snapshot)	Description
`volcanoes`	~1,200	One row per Holocene volcano
`eruptions`	~10,000	One row per recorded eruption
`events`	~30,000	One row per individual event within an eruption

library(volcanoes)

head(volcanoes)
head(eruptions)
head(events)

The three tables join on volcano_number and eruption_number:

library(dplyr)

volcanoes |>
  inner_join(eruptions, by = "volcano_number") |>
  filter(vei >= 5)

Refreshing the data

GVP publishes a new database version roughly every month. To rebuild the package's .rda files against the current release:

source("data-raw/build.R")

volcanoes and eruptions are pulled from GVP's WFS endpoint and refresh in seconds. events is scraped from per-volcano pages via headless Chromium (chromote) and takes about an hour the first time; subsequent runs reuse a local cache in data-raw/cache/events/. See data-raw/README.md for setup details and the politeness expectations.

Data source and license

The underlying records are © Smithsonian Institution, Global Volcanism Program, and are subject to GVP's terms of use. Cite GVP in any downstream work — for example: