Where and when did the first volcano erupt?

This is not as easy a question as it looks, because it depends on your definition of a volcano, and because volcanoes have been erupting a lot longer than people have been around to observe them. The oldest lava flows found on Earth, near the village of Inukjuak, on the shore of Hudson Bay in Canada, are 3.825 billion years old. These rocks are certainly the product of a volcanic eruption, but they were not the first volcanic rocks erupted on Earth. Earth is an active planet, on which the surface rocks are being constantly removed by erosion, buried by younger rocks and folded under by the movement of tectonic plates. The Earth is 4.56 billion years old, but the first 700 million years of Earth history are poorly preserved. When we look at the full moon, we can see light and dark areas. The dark patches are covered by extensive lava flows from lunar volcanoes that erupted 3.1 to 4.3 billion years ago. The moon is less geologically active than Earth, so old lunar lavas are better preserved than those on Earth.

If you are asking about the oldest volcano that still has the general, conical shape of a volcano, then these 3-to-4-billion-year-old lunar and terrestrial rocks don’t count. Mt. Etna in Italy is sometimes called the oldest active volcano because it has the longest historic record of eruptions. It has erupted 190 times in the last 3,500 years. This is a bit misleading, however, because it was already an old volcano when the first recorded eruption occurred in 1,500 BC. We don’t have historic records for volcanic eruptions before that, so we have to rely on isotopic age dates instead. The Island of Hawaii has two active volcanoes, Kilauea and Mauna Loa, which have been active for at least 100,000 years. Hawaii is the youngest of a long line of volcanoes called the Hawaiian-Emperor Sea Mount chain. The oldest volcano in the chain is the inactive volcano Meiji, which is 85 million years old.

So to answer your original question, volcanoes have been erupting on Earth for at least the last 4 billion years and were undoubtedly more active in the distant past than they are today. During historic times, not a year has gone by without a volcanic eruption somewhere on Earth.

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