Be sure to vote for Group D in the poll at the bottom!

USA – 340/165/63/39 – Great Sitkin, Kīlauea

The US has never been great at international football, er, soccer. Maybe because we never adopted the proper name. Maybe because baseball, basketball, football and hockey all overshadowing soccer for so many decades. Maybe because we don’t have the patience for it. Who knows. Don’t expect the US to win the real World Cup. However, the Volcano World Cup is another story. Look at those stats: 340 volcanoes active in the past couple million years, 165 in the Holocene. Heck, 39 eruptions since 1960. We’re talking real, sustained success at making magma erupt from the ground. Most of those gaudy numbers are thanks to the Aleutian arc in Alaska, but don’t sleep on the lower 48 and remember Hawai’i as well.

Paraguay – 0/0/0/0

South America has a lot of volcanoes. If you ran down the west coast of the continent you’d likely be close to a volcano most of the way (except for a few gaps). The east coast? That’s a different story. Paraguay may border volcanically-rich countries like Bolivia and Argentina but it is far enough east that it sits in a tectonically-quiet part of the continent. Sure, volcanoes did exist in the distant past, but the most recent eruptions might be almost 40 million years ago in the Asunción alkaline province in the eastern part of the country.

Australia – 12/4/2/2 – Heard Island

Australia is country and a continent. As continents go, it is currently the most tectonically moribund. There are no subduction zones, rifts, hotspots of note across the entire country. There are about a dozen volcanoes that have been active since the start of the Pleistocene, many of them in the northern corner of the country. In fact, there have been 2 eruptions in Australia since 1960. Surprised? You should be because one of those is Heard Island off in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The other … well, it was right next to Heard Island in the McDonald Islands. Both are part of the Kerguelen Hotspot Volcano Group that is a mere ~4,000 kilometers from any spot on the Australian continent.

Türkiye – 18/7/2/0

Considering how complicated and active the tectonics of Türkiye are, it should come as no surprise that it has some volcanoes. Likely the most famous is Ararat that last erupted in 1840. However, it isn’t even the most recent eruption in the country. Tendürek Dagi erupted in 1855 when the shield volcano produced a small gas and ash eruption. Of course, my favorite Turkish volcano fun fact is the supposed “oldest human drawing of a volcanic eruption” in the famed Çatalhöyük volcano mural that may have been a record of the eruption of Hasan in ~6,900 BCE.