Spanning only about one percent of the world’s surface, the area called the “Ring of Fire” creates more volcanic and seismic activity than anywhere else on Earth. More than half of the world’s active volcanoes lie along the ring, and thousands of earthquakes occur within the region each year.

Nearly 25,000 miles in length, the Ring of Fire winds in the approximate shape of a horseshoe through a series of diverse lands at the rims of the Pacific Ocean. From the majestic Andes Mountains of South America, the ring stretches northward along the Central American and Mexican coasts to California, the American Northwest, and, at its most northerly point, Alaska’s barren Aleutian Islands. Crossing the Russian peninsula, the zone then travels southward through Japan and the tropical Philippines to New Zealand.

Scientists theorize that the location of the volcanoes and the occurrence of earthquakes along the Ring of Fire are caused by the motion of tectonic plates. A patchwork of these solid and bulky plates (about 50 miles thick), each moving at a rate of a few centimeters per year, form Earth’s surface. In a process known as subduction, the edge of one plate sinks below the edge of another plate, causing earthquakes and leading to the formation of a chain of volcanoes along the border of the upper plate.

PostScript: Among the catastrophic events occurring along the Ring of Fire are the biggest earthquake ever recorded (which, with a magnitude of 9.5, occurred in Chile in 1960) and the eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington in 1980.