Volcanoes in Canada

Canada has 24 Holocene volcanoes catalogued by the Smithsonian Global Volcanism Program, making it the 11th most volcanically endowed country in the world by total count. The vast majority of these volcanoes are concentrated along the mountainous spine of British Columbia and the southern Yukon, in a volcanic belt that stretches over 1,200 km from the [[country:united-states|United States]] border northward to the central Yukon Territory. Unlike the dramatically active volcanoes of neighbouring [[country:japan|Japan]] or [[country:indonesia|Indonesia]], Canada's volcanoes are quieter — none has erupted in living memory, and the most recent confirmed eruption occurred approximately 1800 CE at the Iskut-Unuk River Cones near the Alaska border.

This relative quiescence, however, is geologically misleading. Canada sits atop two powerful volcanic engines: the Cascadia subduction zone along its Pacific coast, where the Juan de Fuca Plate dives beneath the North American Plate, and a series of intraplate hotspots responsible for the Northern Cordilleran Volcanic Province (NCVP), one of the largest areas of young volcanic activity in North America. The country's most explosive known eruption — a VEI 5 event at [[volcano:meager|Mount Meager]] around 2,360 years ago — produced one of the largest eruptions in the [[special:ring-of-fire|Ring of Fire]] during the late Holocene.

With approximately 300,000 Canadians living within 30 km of a potentially active volcano and major infrastructure including pipelines and highways crossing volcanic terrain, Canada's volcanism represents an underappreciated natural hazard that the Geological Survey of Canada continues to assess and monitor.

Canada's volcanism arises from two fundamentally different tectonic mechanisms, each responsible for a distinct style of volcanic activity. Along the southwest coast of British Columbia, the Cascadia subduction zone generates volcanism as the oceanic Juan de Fuca and Explorer Plates slide beneath the continental North American Plate at approximately 40 mm per year. This process, identical to the one driving the explosive [[volcano:st-helens|Mount St.

Helens]] and [[volcano:rainier|Mount Rainier]] further south in Washington State, has produced the Garibaldi Volcanic Belt — a chain of stratovolcanoes and volcanic fields running from [[volcano:garibaldi|Mount Garibaldi]] and [[volcano:meager|Mount Meager]] in the south to the Silverthrone caldera in the north. These subduction volcanoes tend toward more explosive, andesitic eruptions.

Farther inland and to the north, an entirely separate volcanic province — the Northern Cordilleran Volcanic Province (NCVP) — extends over 1,200 km through north-central British Columbia into the Yukon. This volcanism is unrelated to subduction. Instead, it results from deep intraplate processes, likely linked to mantle upwelling or edge-driven convection along the margin of the thick cratonic lithosphere of central Canada.

The NCVP includes massive shield volcanoes like Level Mountain (2,164 m, covering 1,800 km²), stratovolcanoes like Mount Edziza (2,786 m), and scattered pyroclastic cones and lava fields. These volcanoes predominantly erupt basaltic to trachytic lavas, often producing extensive lava flows rather than explosive columns. A third volcanic mechanism operates beneath the seafloor off British Columbia's coast, where the Juan de Fuca Ridge creates new oceanic crust at the Endeavour, Cobb, and West Valley Segments — three submarine fissure vent systems that constitute Canada's only mid-ocean ridge volcanoes.

The Anahim Volcanic Belt, running east-west across central BC and terminating at Nazko Cone, represents yet another mechanism — a possible hotspot track similar to the one producing [[country:united-states|Yellowstone]] far to the south.

**Mount Meager** (2,680 m / 8,793 ft) is a glaciated [[special:types-of-volcanoes|complex volcano]] roughly 150 km north of Vancouver and is considered the most potentially hazardous volcano in Canada. Its most significant eruption, a VEI 5 event around 410 BCE, produced a massive explosive column and pyroclastic flows — the largest known eruption in the Canadian Cascades. In 2010, a major landslide on Meager's south flank — triggered by glacial retreat and volcanic rock instability — sent 48 million cubic metres of debris down the Lillooet River valley, demonstrating the compound hazard even without active eruptions.

The volcano has significant geothermal resources that have been explored for energy production.

**Mount Garibaldi** (2,678 m / 8,786 ft) towers over the resort town of Squamish, just 66 km north of Vancouver. This andesitic [[special:types-of-volcanoes|stratovolcano]] last erupted around 8060 BCE in a VEI 3 event. It sits within Garibaldi Provincial Park and is one of Canada's most recognizable volcanic peaks, though many hikers reaching its summit are unaware they are standing on a potentially active volcano.

Its formation is notable because much of the edifice was built against the margins of Pleistocene glaciers, leaving the Barrier — a dramatic lava cliff — as evidence of eruption against an ice wall.

**Mount Edziza** (2,786 m / 9,140 ft) is a massive composite stratovolcano in the Stikine region of northern British Columbia and one of the most voluminous volcanic centres in the NCVP. Its eruptive history spans 7.5 million years across five magmatic cycles. The most recent eruption, approximately 950 CE (VEI 3), produced lava flows that remain largely unvegetated — a stark volcanic landscape within the surrounding boreal forest.

Mount Edziza Provincial Park protects the volcanic landscape, including the striking Eve Cone, an almost perfectly symmetrical cinder cone that has become an iconic Canadian geological landmark.

**Silverthrone** (2,860 m / 9,383 ft) is the highest volcano in Canada and a large caldera complex in the Coast Mountains of British Columbia. Despite its status as the country's tallest volcanic centre, Silverthrone is among the least studied of Canada's volcanoes due to its extreme remoteness and heavy glaciation. No historical eruptions are recorded, but its Holocene age classification means it is considered potentially active.

**Tseax River Cone** (612 m / 2,008 ft) holds the grim distinction of producing Canada's deadliest known volcanic eruption. Around 1690 CE, this small basaltic cinder cone erupted lava flows that travelled approximately 22 km down the Tseax and Nass River valleys. Nisga'a oral histories recount that the eruption and associated volcanic gases killed approximately 2,000 people in two villages — Lax Ksiluux and Wii Lax K'abit — making it one of the deadliest volcanic events in North American history.

The Nisga'a Lava Bed Memorial Park preserves both the volcanic landscape and the cultural memory of the disaster. It is the only volcanic eruption in Canada for which a significant human death toll has been documented.

**Wells Gray-Clearwater Volcanic Field** (950 m) is a scattered volcanic field in the central interior of British Columbia, notable for eruptions as recently as approximately 1550 CE. Lava flows from these eruptions dammed rivers to create several lakes, including Clearwater Lake. The field demonstrates that volcanic activity in Canada's interior is far more recent than most Canadians realize.

**Nazko Cone** (1,238 m) sits at the eastern terminus of the Anahim Volcanic Belt, a chain that may trace the movement of the North American Plate over a mantle hotspot. In 2007, a swarm of over 1,000 small earthquakes beneath Nazko Cone drew attention from the Geological Survey of Canada, representing the first significant seismic unrest at a Canadian volcano monitored by modern instruments. The swarm was interpreted as possible magma movement at depth, though no eruption occurred.

**Level Mountain** (2,164 m) is one of the largest volcanic complexes in Canada by volume, covering an area of 1,800 km² — roughly the size of the city of London. This massive intraplate shield volcano in the Stikine region erupted a combined volume of approximately 860 km³ of material over its long eruptive history, though its most recent activity is poorly constrained.

**Garibaldi Lake Volcanic Field** (2,316 m) includes nine small andesitic stratovolcanoes and basaltic vents north of Mount Garibaldi, including The Black Tusk — an iconic eroded volcanic plug popular with hikers. These vents are part of the broader Garibaldi Volcanic Belt and represent the northernmost extension of Cascade Arc volcanism.

**Hoodoo Mountain** (1,850 m) is a flat-topped volcano in the Boundary Ranges near the Alaska border composed of both subglacial and subaerial volcanic products. Its distinctive shape — a result of eruptions beneath Pleistocene glaciers — represents a tuya, a type of table-mountain unique to glaciated volcanic regions.

Canada's eruption record is sparse compared to its Pacific Rim neighbours, a reflection both of genuinely lower eruption frequency and of limited historical observation in a vast, sparsely populated wilderness. The Smithsonian database records eruptions at just 10 of the country's 24 Holocene volcanoes, with only 24 total eruption entries across the entire dataset. The most significant known eruption is the VEI 5 event at Mount Meager around 410 BCE, which produced explosive pyroclastic flows and an eruption column comparable to the 1980 eruption of [[volcano:st-helens|Mount St.

Helens]]. Prior to this, Mount Garibaldi produced a VEI 3 eruption around 8060 BCE, and the submarine Endeavour Segment on the Juan de Fuca Ridge erupted around 3490 BCE.

The eruptions most relevant to human history in Canada are far more recent. The Tseax River Cone eruption of approximately 1690 CE devastated Nisga'a communities along the Nass River, killing an estimated 2,000 people through lava flows and lethal volcanic gas emissions — the only known fatal volcanic eruption in Canadian history. The Iskut-Unuk River Cones near the Alaska border produced multiple small eruptions estimated at around 1800 CE, making them the most recently active volcanic centre in Canada.

Wells Gray-Clearwater erupted around 1550 CE, and Mount Edziza's most recent VEI 3 eruption occurred around 950 CE.

Paleovolcanological research has expanded this picture considerably. Studies of tephra layers across western Canada reveal that several Holocene eruptions may be missing from the current database, and that ash from eruptions at volcanoes in the northwestern United States — including the cataclysmic eruption of [[volcano:crater-lake|Mount Mazama]] around 5700 BCE — blanketed portions of British Columbia and Alberta.

Despite Canada's relatively quiet volcanic record, the Geological Survey of Canada has identified several significant volcanic hazards that could affect populations, infrastructure, and aviation. The primary risk centres on the Garibaldi Volcanic Belt, where [[volcano:meager|Mount Meager]] and Mount Garibaldi lie within 150 km of Metro Vancouver, home to 2.6 million people. A large explosive eruption at Meager comparable to the VEI 5 event of 410 BCE could produce pyroclastic flows, lahars along the Lillooet River valley, and ashfall reaching Vancouver — disrupting one of Canada's largest urban centres and its major international airport.

Landslides represent an immediate and ongoing hazard at several glaciated volcanoes. The 2010 Meager landslide demonstrated that volcanic terrain can produce catastrophic mass movements even without eruptions, as hydrothermally altered rock weakened by volcanic gases becomes unstable — particularly as climate change accelerates glacial retreat. Lahars — volcanic mudflows — pose a particularly insidious threat because they can be triggered by eruptions melting glacial ice or by heavy rainfall mobilizing loose volcanic debris.

The Sea-to-Sky Highway (Highway 99), a major transportation corridor linking Vancouver to Whistler, crosses potential lahar pathways from Mount Garibaldi.

Volcanic ash from a Canadian eruption could severely disrupt trans-Pacific and domestic aviation, as demonstrated by the 2010 [[volcano:eyjafjallajokull|Eyjafjallajökull]] eruption in [[country:iceland|Iceland]]. Monitoring capacity remains limited compared to countries like the United States, Japan, or Iceland: as of 2024, no Canadian volcano has a dedicated real-time monitoring network comparable to those operated by the USGS Cascades Volcano Observatory for American Cascade volcanoes. The Canadian Hazards Information Service and Natural Resources Canada maintain seismic networks and conduct periodic assessments, but the remoteness and number of potentially active centres presents a significant challenge.

Canada's volcanoes are concentrated in three distinct geographic zones, all within the western cordillera. The Garibaldi Volcanic Belt extends from the [[country:united-states|United States]] border near Vancouver northward approximately 150 km to the Silverthrone caldera, following the Cascadia subduction zone. This is the Canadian continuation of the Cascade Range that includes [[volcano:st-helens|Mount St.

Helens]] and [[volcano:rainier|Mount Rainier]]. Volcanoes here — including Garibaldi, Meager, Cayley, and Garibaldi Lake — are andesitic stratovolcanoes typical of subduction arcs.

Farther north and inland, the Northern Cordilleran Volcanic Province (NCVP) extends over 1,200 km from central British Columbia into the Yukon, containing the largest concentration of Canada's volcanoes. The NCVP includes Mount Edziza, Level Mountain, Heart Peaks, Spectrum Range, Hoodoo Mountain, and the Iskut-Unuk River Cones — predominantly basaltic to trachytic intraplate volcanoes. Between these two provinces, the Anahim Volcanic Belt runs east-west across central British Columbia, with Nazko Cone at its eastern end.

Offshore, three submarine volcanic segments — Endeavour, Cobb, and West Valley — mark the Juan de Fuca Ridge, Canada's only mid-ocean ridge volcanism.

Volcanic activity has shaped the cultural heritage of Indigenous peoples in western Canada for millennia. The Nisga'a people of the Nass River valley maintain detailed oral histories of the Tseax River Cone eruption of approximately 1690 CE, which destroyed two villages and killed an estimated 2,000 people. These oral traditions — passed through generations as adaawak (sacred histories) — provided accurate descriptions of the eruption's sequence, including lava flows, darkness, and suffocating gas, long before geologists confirmed the volcanic origin in the 20th century.

The Nisga'a Lava Bed Memorial Park, part of the Nisga'a Nation's treaty lands, preserves the 18 km² lava field as both a geological site and a place of cultural remembrance. Elsewhere, Tahltan, Tlingit, and other First Nations maintain traditions connected to volcanic landscapes in northern British Columbia.

Geothermal energy represents a growing economic connection to Canada's volcanism. Mount Meager has been explored as a geothermal resource since the 1970s, with subsurface temperatures exceeding 250°C measured at relatively shallow depths. British Columbia's geothermal potential, estimated at thousands of megawatts, could contribute significantly to Canada's clean energy transition.

Provincial parks encompassing volcanic landscapes — including Garibaldi Provincial Park (Mount Garibaldi and The Black Tusk) and Mount Edziza Provincial Park (Eve Cone) — draw hikers and outdoor enthusiasts who may not fully appreciate the volcanic nature of the terrain they traverse.

Canada offers unique opportunities to explore volcanic landscapes in some of North America's most spectacular wilderness settings. Garibaldi Provincial Park, accessible from the Sea-to-Sky Highway between Vancouver and Whistler, features trails to Garibaldi Lake, The Black Tusk (an iconic eroded volcanic plug at 2,316 m), and panoramic views of Mount Garibaldi itself. The Barrier — a dramatic lava cliff formed when volcanic eruptions met Pleistocene glaciers — overlooks the park road.

Most trails are accessible from May to October, with the 9 km Garibaldi Lake trail being the most popular.

Mount Edziza Provincial Park in the Stikine region of northern BC offers a more remote volcanic experience. Eve Cone, a near-perfect symmetrical cinder cone surrounded by lava fields and obsidian flows, is one of Canada's most striking geological landmarks — though reaching it requires a multi-day backcountry trip by foot or floatplane. The Nisga'a Lava Bed Memorial Park near Terrace, BC, is the most accessible volcanic site in Canada, with roads and interpretive trails leading through the Tseax lava flows.

Guided tours led by Nisga'a cultural interpreters connect the volcanic geology with the human story of the eruption. Visitors should note that Canada's volcanic regions are remote and that weather, bears, and limited cell coverage present practical challenges.