What volcanoes are currently erupting across the globe, you ask?  Building on an earlier post of global earthquakes, we can scrape some weekly data from the Smithsonian/USGS Global Volcanism Program to plot the locations of actively erupting volcanoes with R.

The weekly data are provided as an RSS (.xml) feed with the location of each eruption tagged as:

latitude longitude


The below code extracts and parses the location string, converts the string to numeric values, and stores the location of each eruption in a data frame.  From there you can plot the data just as in the earthquakes post.  In fact, the figure below shows all of the active volcanic eruptions (orange circles) and recent earthquakes (blue circles, scaled by magnitude).

 
For more info on active volcanic eruptions visit the Smithsonian/USGS Global Volcanism Program or check out the excellent Eruptions blog, by Erik Klemetti.

Global Volcanic Eruptions Code:

# Get the current eruptions from Smithosonian/USGS
doc <- xmlInternalTreeParse("http://www.volcano.si.edu/news/WeeklyVolcanoRSS.xml")
 
# Parse xml and isolate the eruption locations
x <- xpathApply(doc, "//georss:point")
len <- length(x)
df <- xmlToDataFrame(x)
 
# Convert the eruption list to numeric lat lon
lat <- c()
lon <- c()
for (i in 1:len){
  char <- as.character(df[i, 1])
  num <- as.numeric(unlist(strsplit(char, " ")))
  lat[[i]] <- num[[1]]
  lon[[i]] <- num[[2]]
  }  
vlc <- data.frame(lat, lon)