The Pacific Ring of Fire

The Ring of Fire is a broad belt of earthquake and volcanic activity around the Pacific Ocean. It follows the western coasts of the Americas and continues through Alaska, the Aleutian Islands, eastern Asia, and the southwest Pacific.

Explore this region on the interactive globe →

Why do earthquakes and volcanoes cluster here?

Many of the boundaries around the Pacific are subduction zones, where one plate descends beneath another. Slip along the contact between plates can produce large earthquakes. Processes above the descending plate can also produce magma, feeding chains of volcanoes.

The ring includes other kinds of boundaries, too. Along much of California, plates slide past each other. That movement produces earthquakes without the same chain of subduction-related volcanoes.

Read the map in three stops

1. Start with Chile. Look for the Nazca Plate beside South America. Connect the plate boundary with an earthquake-prone continental margin.
2. Move north to Alaska. Follow the curved Aleutian island chain toward the western Pacific.
3. Continue toward Japan and New Zealand. Notice how many separate plates and boundary segments contribute to the overall pattern.

Use the layer controls in Explorer to compare boundaries with recent earthquakes. The volcano markers are a reference dataset; they do not indicate which volcanoes are currently erupting.

Is it one connected fault?

No. The name describes a geographic pattern made from many plate boundaries and faults. An earthquake in one part of the ring does not, by itself, establish that another part is about to rupture.

The shaded Ring of Fire overlay is a broad geographic guide. Use it to understand the global pattern, not to identify a local fault or assess the hazard at a particular address.