Random Volcano Name Generator

How this volcano name generator works

Press Generate and you get a volcano. Turn up the Number box for several at once, no repeats. Copy takes them. The three filters trim before the draw, and all three ignore case.

Erebus. Krakatau. Tambora. Toba. Yellowstone. Vesuvius. And a great many more you have never heard of, which is the point.

These are real volcanoes

The phrase "name generator" usually means a fantasy tool, the sort of thing that bolts one syllable onto another and hands you Mount Ashfell for your novel.

This is not that. Every name here belongs to a volcano that exists on Earth, at a set of coordinates, made of rock. Acamarachi is in Chile. Adatara is in Japan. Zhupanovsky is in Kamchatka.

So what you get is a real place with a real eruption history, which is either much more useful than an invented name or much less, depending on what you came for.

Why volcano names are printed backwards

Generate a few and something odd jumps out. Bravo, Cerro. Chachani, Nevado. Zubair, Jebel. Alcedo, Volcán. The words are the wrong way round.

That is not a mistake. It is a cataloguing convention. When a volcano's name begins with a generic word for a mountain, in whatever language, a scientific catalogue inverts it so that the distinctive part sorts first. Cerro is Spanish for hill. Nevado means snow-capped. Jebel is Arabic for mountain.

Sort a list of a thousand Latin American volcanoes without inverting, and you get four hundred entries filed under C for Cerro. Invert them and the names become findable.

Alongside them sit entries like NW Rota-1 and Northern EPR-Segment RO3, which are not names at all. They are designations, the kind a survey ship assigns to a feature nobody has ever stood on.

The catalogue that uses exactly these conventions is Volcanoes of the World, maintained by the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program. If you use any volcano list for something that matters, go there.

"How many volcanoes are there" has no answer

This is not evasion. It is the position of the people who keep the world's volcano database, stated plainly on their own website.

Two words are doing all the damage: volcano and active.

Volcano has been applied to a single vent, to a whole mountain built of many vents, and to a volcanic field scattered across a hundred kilometres of desert. Is a field with two hundred cinder cones one volcano or two hundred?

Active is worse. A volcano can sit quiet for ten thousand years and then erupt. Human record-keeping goes back a few thousand years in most places, and a few hundred in others. Calling a volcano extinct is a statement about our records, not about the rock.

So the Smithsonian avoids the word. Instead of active volcanoes they count Holocene volcanoes: those thought to have erupted within roughly the last twelve thousand years. That is a definition you can argue with, which is what makes it a good one.

At any given moment, somewhere between twenty and fifty volcanoes on Earth are erupting.

The number of volcanoes on Earth went down

Here is the fact that ought to be better known, and it is a lesson about what a scientific database actually is.

In 2013, the Smithsonian's Holocene volcano list held 1,422 volcanoes. Later versions carried 1,432, then 1,408.

Today it holds 1,215.

Two hundred volcanoes did not go anywhere. Nobody filled them in. What happened is that researchers went back to the evidence, re-dated eruptions, and concluded that a couple of hundred entries had no good evidence of having erupted in the Holocene after all.

A count that only ever grows is a count nobody is checking. This one shrank, which is how you know somebody is doing their job.

Most of the planet's volcanoes are underwater

Every volcano you can name is on land, and land volcanoes are a rounding error.

The longest mountain range on Earth runs down the middle of the Atlantic and around the globe, and it is volcanic along almost its entire length. It is erupting, somewhere, more or less permanently, and almost nobody has ever seen it happen.

This is why designations like Northern EPR-Segment RO3 exist. EPR is the East Pacific Rise. That entry is a stretch of submarine spreading ridge, catalogued because something erupted there. It has no summit, no name, and no photographs.

Meanwhile the Ring of Fire, the arc around the rim of the Pacific, holds a little over half of the world's Holocene volcanoes. Indonesia, Japan, Russia, the United States and Chile between them account for a very large share of the ones that have a name at all.

Ways people actually use this

• Finding somewhere to read about. Generate one, search for it, and you will nearly always land on a Smithsonian page with an eruption history going back to the Bronze Age.
• Geology teaching. Pull ten and ask which country each is in. The answers cluster in ways that draw the plate boundaries for you.
• Quiz rounds. Almost nobody can name ten volcanoes. Almost everybody thinks they can.
• Naming things, if you are comfortable naming a project after a real mountain that might erupt.
• Testing search and text handling. Names like Acigol-Nevsehir and Bravo, Cerro will find the bugs in your parser.

Getting more out of the filters

• Type jima into Contains for the Japanese island volcanoes. Try cerro for the Spanish-speaking Americas and nevado for the snow-capped ones, and watch the tectonic map assemble itself.
• Set Starts with to K and you get more than any other letter. That is Kamchatka, Kyushu, Java and the Kuriles, all at once.
• Type a comma into Contains to pull out the inverted catalogue names in one go.
• If a filter returns fewer than you asked for, there are not that many matches. Loosen it.

Questions people ask

Are these real volcano names?

Yes. Every one belongs to a volcano that exists, at real coordinates, with a real eruption history. None of them is invented.

How many volcanoes are there in the world?

The Smithsonian's database lists around 1,215 volcanoes thought to have erupted in the last twelve thousand years. That is the most defensible number available, and the people who publish it will tell you the question is badly formed.

How many volcanoes are erupting right now?

Between twenty and fifty, as you read this. Around forty have eruptions that are formally recorded as continuing.

What is a Holocene volcano?

One believed to have erupted within roughly the last twelve thousand years. Volcanologists prefer this to "active", because a volcano dormant for eight thousand years is not extinct, it is patient.

Which country has the most volcanoes?

The United States, Japan, Indonesia, Russia and Chile lead, and the order shifts depending on how you count a volcanic field. All five sit on or near the Ring of Fire.

References

1. Global Volcanism Program, Smithsonian Institution
2. Holocene volcano list
3. How many active volcanoes are there?
4. Volcanoes of the World, database release