Data for about 1300 volcanoes around the world from the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program (GVP) are accessible through this Google Earth layer. Only those volcanoes with known or inferred eruptive activity during the Holocene era (the past 10,000 years) are shown. Volcanoes with possible, but uncertain activity during the Holocene and a few dozen Pleistocene volcanoes (older than 10,000 years) with current hydrothermal activity are included on the GVP website, but are not displayed in Google Earth. Additional information about the volcanoes seen in Google Earth, including eruption chronologies, is available on this website.

Volcano locations: In some instances users will note mismatches between plotted volcano locations and the summits of volcanoes seen in Google Earth satellite imagery. This can occur for several reasons, including data precision. Some data are available only in degrees/minutes rather than degrees/minutes/seconds. This can result in apparent plotting discrepancies of up to about a kilometer — at the equator one minute is equivalent to 1.9 km. In other cases, location data for volcanic fields (large clusters of small volcanic vents) are shown by the center-points of the volcanic fields, which often do not correspond to specific volcanic vents.

A more fundamental problem originates from the fact that regional topographic mapping does not utilize a standardized global datum. Thus locations from topographic maps often diverge from those of the World Geodetic System datum used in geo-registered satellite imagery in Google Earth. The Tokyo Datum used for topographic maps in Japan, for example, results in volcano locations that commonly vary by about 10 to 15 seconds of latitude and longitude from those using the global standard datum WGS84 and thus can be offset by up to about a half kilometer. Similarly, regional datums elsewhere can affect plotting of volcano locations.