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Volcanoes in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables
A dataset of volcano news from a global news index, January 2019 – July 2026, built with the Prism News API (historical and real-time news, https://radar-api.fliarbi.com/news). Every row is one news article about volcanoes or volcanic activity, with its date, location, tone, editorial priority, themes and the organisations it names, plus a link that returns the full article through the API.
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Key findings
In a global news index covering January 2019 to July 2026, January 2022, the month of the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai eruption and tsunami, was the month in which volcanoes took their largest share of news, at 13.46 articles per 10,000 news articles.
Basis: Monthly volcano articles (2,240 in January 2022) divided by all articles in the index for the same month, every month from January 2019 to July 2026.
December 2019, the month of the Whakaari / White Island eruption in New Zealand, had the second-largest monthly share of volcano news between January 2019 and July 2026, at 13.23 articles per 10,000 news articles.
Basis: 1,274 volcano articles in December 2019 against 962,802 articles in the index that month.
Volcanoes took their largest annual share of news between 2019 and 2025 in 2021, at 5.11 articles per 10,000, 2.1 times the 2020 share; September 2021, the month the Cumbre Vieja eruption on La Palma began, reached 10.64 per 10,000.
Basis: Annual and monthly volcano articles divided by all articles in the index for the same period.
December and January together held an average of 26.17% of each year's volcano news coverage between 2019 and 2025, against about one-sixth for an even spread; the months of several of the period's largest eruptions fell in December and January, so the pattern reflects the timing of single events rather than a season.
Basis: Within-year month shares of 47,980 matched articles, averaged over the complete years 2019–2025.
The share of news given to volcanoes fell by 34.1% between 2023 and 2025, from 3.87 to 2.55 articles per 10,000 news articles, the second-lowest annual share between 2019 and 2025 after 2020 (2.43).
Basis: Annual volcano articles divided by all articles in the index (20,484,506 in 2023; 26,990,006 in 2025).
Charts and maps
Coverage by country
Primary location of located articles, January 2023 – July 2026. Lift = the country's share of this topic's news ÷ its share of all located news (above 1 = over-covered).
| Country | Articles | Share | Lift |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 2,669 | 25.8% | 0.53 |
| Indonesia | 1,428 | 13.8% | 49.64 |
| Iceland | 819 | 7.92% | 67.1 |
| Philippines | 622 | 6.01% | 19.07 |
| Italy | 585 | 5.65% | 5.84 |
| India | 347 | 3.35% | 0.25 |
| Japan | 323 | 3.12% | 2.94 |
| New Zealand | 283 | 2.74% | 4.23 |
| Mexico | 239 | 2.31% | 7.47 |
| United Kingdom | 205 | 1.98% | 0.34 |
| Russia | 200 | 1.93% | 2.57 |
| Guatemala | 200 | 1.93% | 85.26 |
| Australia | 151 | 1.46% | 0.68 |
| France | 122 | 1.18% | 0.6 |
| Chile | 119 | 1.15% | 6.14 |
Use the API
This dataset was built with the Prism News API, which serves historical and real-time news. Install the command-line client, log in with an API key, and query the topic yourself:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fliarbi/prism-news-api/main/scripts/install.sh | bash
prism-news login
prism-news trends "volcano" --granularity monthly --tableCite
Fliar BI. Volcanoes in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables. January 2019 – July 2026. https://fliarbi.github.io/news-datasets/volcano/