Signs in the Earth · Joel 2:30
Volcanoes in the Bible
Fire, smoke, and the trembling mountain — Joel's "signs in the earth," watched against live volcanic activity.
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Volcano events on watch
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New volcanic events · 30 days
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“And I will shew wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke.”
What the Bible says about volcanoes
Scripture never uses the word "volcano," but its imagery is unmistakably volcanic: Sinai "altogether on a smoke... as the smoke of a furnace" while "the whole mount quaked greatly" (Exodus 19:18); mountains that "flowed down" at God's presence (Isaiah 64:1–3); hills that "melt like wax" (Psalm 97:5); and Joel's wonders in the earth — "blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke" — which Peter quotes at Pentecost as last-days language (Acts 2:19). The prophets reached for the most overwhelming physical events their world knew, and eruptions are on that list.
As with earthquakes, the framing is watchfulness rather than calculation: signs in the earth belong to the "great and terrible day" language of Joel, a horizon rather than a schedule.
How this watch reads the data
The World Now tracks volcanic activity as it develops — new eruptions, raised alert levels, ash advisories — as discrete monitored events. The feed on this page lists what is on watch right now, and the counts above it update as events open and resolve. Pillars of smoke, with coordinates.
Go deeper
The full interactive tracker behind this watch is live on Volcano tracker.
Watch reports · Signs in the Earth
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Questions people ask
Are volcanoes mentioned in the Bible?
Not by name — the word did not exist in Hebrew or Koine Greek — but volcanic imagery is everywhere: Sinai smoking like a furnace and quaking (Exodus 19:18), mountains flowing down (Isaiah 64:1–3), and Joel's "blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke" (Joel 2:30).
What does Joel 2:30 mean?
Joel 2:30–31 promises visible wonders in the heavens and the earth before "the great and terrible day of the LORD." Peter cites the passage at Pentecost (Acts 2:19–20) as describing the last days broadly — signs to be seen across an era, not a single datable event.
How many volcanoes are erupting right now?
It changes weekly — which is the point of a live watch. The counters on this page show how many volcanic events The World Now currently has on watch and how many opened in the last 30 days, updated continuously from the monitoring database.