Ninety percent of the 55,000 kilometers (34,000 miles) of subduction plate boundaries on Earth are in the Pacific Ocean region. (Image credit: PeterHermesFurian/Getty Images)
The Ring of Fire is a vast belt of active and dormant volcanoes that encircles much of the Pacific Ocean. It extends from southern Chile along the west coast of America, through Alaska, and across Japan to the Philippines. Some geologists also include the volcanic chain of Indonesia in the ring.
These volcanoes are formed by subduction, a process in which one tectonic plate sinks beneath another, causing the melting temperature of rocks in the mantle to drop. The rock turns into magma, rises to the surface, and erupts as volcanoes.
But in the Ring of Fire, this subduction is happening on a scale that is unmatched elsewhere. “What’s unique about the Ring of Fire is that it’s where a lot of the oceanic plates in the Pacific Ocean have subduction boundaries,” Louik Vanderclusen, a volcanologist at Drexel University in Philadelphia, told Live Science. About 90 percent of the 55,000 kilometers (34,000 miles) of subduction plate boundaries on Earth are in the Pacific Ocean, Vanderclusen said.
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Sourse: www.livescience.com
