The Ring of Fire is a horseshoe-shaped band of fault lines that circles the Pacific Basin and is prone to frequent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. It is the most seismically active zone on the planet.
The Ring of Fire extends 40,000km and includes 452 volcanoes.
It stretches from the southern tip of South America, up and along the west coast of North America, across the Bering Strait and down through Japan and then south to New Zealand.
It also takes in Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, and Indonesia, where the Indo-Australian Plate collides with the Eurasian Plate.
he most catastrophic earthquakes have taken place around the Ring of Fire, including the strongest one on record, a magnitude 9.5 in Chile in the 1960s.
