Volcanoes guide
The Pacific Ring of Fire: Why Most Volcanoes and Earthquakes Happen There
Around the edge of the Pacific Ocean runs a horseshoe of volcanoes and fault lines about 40,000 km long. It is where most of the planet's earthquakes and eruptions happen.
Updated 4 November 2026
What it is
The Ring of Fire is not a single feature but a chain of plate boundaries around the Pacific Ocean, from New Zealand up through Indonesia, the Philippines and Japan, across the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, and down the west coast of the Americas to Chile. Along it lie roughly three-quarters of the world's active volcanoes and about 90% of its earthquakes.
Why the Pacific is ringed with fire
Most of the ring is made of subduction zones, where the ocean plates under the Pacific slide beneath the plates around it, sinking into the mantle at a few centimetres a year, about as fast as your fingernails grow.
- Earthquakes: the two plates grind and lock as one dives beneath the other, then slip suddenly. The largest earthquakes ever recorded all struck here or on the similar subduction zone off Sumatra. See The biggest earthquakes in history.
- Volcanoes: as the sinking plate goes deeper, water squeezed out of it melts the rock above. The magma rises and builds lines of steep, explosive volcanoes running parallel to the coast.
- Deep trenches: where the plate bends down, the ocean floor drops into trenches, including the Mariana Trench, the deepest point on Earth at about 11 km.
Countries on the Ring of Fire
Around the ring, roughly clockwise from the south-west: New Zealand, Tonga, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Japan, Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula, the United States (Alaska and the west coast), Canada, Mexico, the countries of Central America, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Chile.
Indonesia has the most volcanoes that have erupted in recorded history of any country, and Japan has more than 100 active volcanoes.
Famous volcanoes along the ring
| Volcano | Where | Known for |
|---|---|---|
| Mount St Helens | Washington, USA | The 1980 sideways blast that removed its summit |
| Pinatubo | Philippines | The 1991 eruption that briefly cooled the planet |
| Fuji | Japan | Japan's highest mountain, last erupted in 1707 |
| Krakatau | Indonesia | The 1883 eruption heard thousands of km away |
| Popocatépetl | Mexico | Frequent eruptions close to Mexico City |
| Ruapehu | New Zealand | One of the country's most active volcanoes |
| Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha'apai | Tonga | The 2022 explosion, the biggest in the atmosphere for over a century |
Volcanoes that aren't on the ring
Many famous volcanoes have nothing to do with it. Hawaii's volcanoes sit over a hotspot in the middle of the Pacific plate. Iceland lies on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where plates pull apart. Etna and Vesuvius in Italy are fed by the collision of Africa and Europe. Each kind behaves differently: hotspot and ridge volcanoes usually pour out runny lava, while subduction volcanoes tend to explode.
See every volcano on the Live map, and read Volcano alert levels and the VEI to understand how their danger is rated.
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