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volcanoes volcanoes hex logo

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:

Global Volcanism Program. Volcanoes of the World (v. 5.2.x). Smithsonian Institution. https://doi.org/10.5479/si.GVP.VOTW5-2024.5.2

The package code and the curated tibbles as distributed here are MIT licensed; see LICENSE.md.

These binaries (installable software) and packages are in development.
They may not be fully stable and should be used with caution. We make no claims about them.
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