The Biggest Volcanoes in the World, Ranked Three Ways

"Biggest" Is a Trick Question

Search for the biggest volcano in the world and you'll get a different answer on every page — because the question is ambiguous and most articles just pick one meaning and run with it. A volcano can be big three ways: how high its summit reaches, how much rock it's made of, and how much ground it covers. These give three completely different winners, and none of them is wrong.

First, a distinction that trips up most lists: this page is about the size of the mountain, not the size of its eruptions. Those are separate questions. If you want the most powerful blasts in history — Tambora, Toba, Yellowstone — that's our guide to the largest volcanic eruptions. A volcano can be enormous and barely erupt (Ojos del Salado), or small and catastrophically violent (Krakatoa). Here we're measuring the edifice.

Tallest Volcanoes, by Elevation

The tallest volcano on Earth is Ojos del Salado, at 6,879 m (22,569 ft)on the Chile–Argentina border — also the second-highest peak anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, behind only Aconcagua (which isn't a volcano). Almost the entire top ten sits in the same place: the high, dry Andes of the Atacama, where thin crust and a parched climate let volcanoes stack up to extraordinary heights without glaciers grinding them down.

Elevations from our Smithsonian GVP records (data/volcanoes.json), verified 2026-07-29 — they match each volcano's own page. "Holocene" means the last known eruption falls in the past ~11,700 years but isn't dated to a specific year; "Pleistocene" means its last activity is older still. Several of these are dormant rather than extinct.

Chimborazo(#9 here at 6,261 m) is the farthest point from Earth's center. Because the planet bulges at the equator, its summit — not Everest's — is the "highest" on Earth measured from the middle of the planet, even though it's nearly 2,600 m shorter above sea level.

Largest Volcanoes, by Volume

Height is deceptive. A tall Andean cone can be a relatively thin spire, while a broad shield volcano that barely clears the horizon can hold a staggering amount of rock. Measure by volume and the tall Andean volcanoes vanish from the list entirely — the winners are all shields, and most of them are underwater.

The reigning champion is Pūhāhonu, a mostly submerged shield in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. A 2020 study (Garcia et al., Earth and Planetary Science Letters) put its volume at roughly 148,000 km³ — about twice Mauna Loa — making it the largest shield volcano on Earth by volume. It had long been overlooked precisely because almost all of it lies below the sea.

The most massive volcano that rises above the water is still Mauna Loa, in Hawaii — around 75,000 km³ of basalt, and about 4,170 m above sea level (more than 9,000 m from its true base on the ocean floor). For most of the 20th century it was taught as the biggest volcano on Earth, full stop. The submarine discoveries since 2013 rewrote that.

Biggest Footprint, by Area

The third way to measure is ground covered — and here the winner is Tamu Massif, a submarine massif on the Shatsky Rise about 1,600 km east of Japan. Its base spans roughly 310,000 km² — about the size of New Mexico, or Poland. When it was described in 2013 it was hailed as the largest single volcano on Earth.

That title comes with an asterisk. A 2019 study (Sager et al.) argued that Tamu Massif may not be one central volcano at all, but a structure built largely by eruptions along a mid-ocean spreading ridge — which would disqualify it as a single volcano even if the pile of lava is real. If a 310,000 km² lava pile might not even count as "a volcano," the word itself is doing a lot of quiet work.

Which of the Giants Can You Actually Visit?

More of these than you'd think. Mauna Loa sits inside Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park and shares the island with its far more active neighbor Kīlauea; the two share one island, so you can stand on a 75,000 km³ shield and watch its restless neighbor erupt in the same afternoon. Ojos del Salado, despite being the tallest volcano on Earth, is a non-technical climb — its summit is one of the highest points a person can reach on foot without ropes, though the altitude is brutal.

The most accessible giant in Europe is Mount Etna in Sicily — not the biggest on any of these lists, but among the largest volcanoes in Europe and easy to reach, with cable cars and guided walks up its flanks. See our Etna hiking guide and browse volcano tours for trips to visitable volcanoes worldwide.

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