The Pulse of the Earth
Ten thousand years of volcanic eruptions replayed on a loop: the Earth has never stopped shaking, the ring of fire barely visible at rest.
The Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program records every known volcanic eruption since the start of the Holocene, roughly ten thousand years ago: one thousand two hundred and fourteen volcanoes, over eleven thousand documented eruptions, from the most recent direct observation to the oldest geological trace.
This world map makes every volcano pulse at the real moment of its eruptions, replayed on a continuous loop across the whole period. The pace clearly picks up as the playback nears the present: partly because volcanism has genuinely clustered in certain periods, but largely because recent eruptions are far better documented than those from several millennia ago, a bias in the catalog worth keeping in mind, not a one-directional acceleration of the phenomenon itself.
Show the data as a table
| Millennium | Eruptions | Explosivity index 4 or more | Active volcanoes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8000 BC to 7001 BC | 178 | 32 | 120 |
| 7000 BC to 6001 BC | 186 | 32 | 125 |
| 6000 BC to 5001 BC | 225 | 26 | 138 |
| 5000 BC to 4001 BC | 246 | 26 | 143 |
| 4000 BC to 3001 BC | 227 | 33 | 137 |
| 3000 BC to 2001 BC | 286 | 51 | 144 |
| 2000 BC to 1001 BC | 364 | 61 | 193 |
| 1000 BC to 1 BC | 480 | 69 | 230 |
| 0 to 999 | 692 | 117 | 245 |
| 1000 to 1999 | 6,990 | 250 | 655 |
| 2000 to 2026 | 1,063 | 32 | 234 |
| 8000 BC to 2026 | 10,937 | 729 | 881 |
Data sources
Download the prepared data: eruptions.json (1 MB)
Files as the visualization uses them. Reuse remains subject to the licenses of the sources above.
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