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.
# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("moderndive/volcanoes")| 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)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.
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:
Global Volcanism Program. Volcanoes of the World (v. 5.x.x). Smithsonian Institution. https://doi.org/10.5479/si.GVP.VOTW5-2024.5.1
The package code and the curated tibbles as distributed here are MIT
licensed; see ../LICENSE.md.