The Ring of Fire and Global Seismic Zones

The Pacific Ring of Fire is a roughly horseshoe-shaped belt of intense seismic and volcanic activity that traces the margins of the Pacific Plate for approximately 40,000 kilometers, from the southern tip of South America, up the west coast of the Americas, across the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, down through Kamchatka, Japan, the Philippines, and Indonesia, to New Zealand and the island arcs of the southwest Pacific. According to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), about 90 percent of the world's earthquakes and roughly 75 percent of the planet's active and dormant volcanoes lie along this belt. The Ring of Fire is not a single fault or a coincidence of geography but the direct physical consequence of plate tectonics: the Pacific Plate and its neighbors are being subducted beneath, or are colliding with, a ring of surrounding plates, generating the friction, melting, and crustal deformation that produce both earthquakes and volcanism along nearly its entire length.