Both earthquakes and volcanoes are natural hazards that usually happen where Earth’s tectonic plates meet and move, and both can cause serious damage to people and the environment.

Quick Scoop

  • Both are linked to tectonic plate movement at or near plate boundaries, where plates collide, pull apart, or slide past each other.
  • Both release energy from inside the Earth: earthquakes through sudden fault movement, volcanoes through rising magma and erupting lava and gases.
  • Both tend to cluster in the same regions, such as the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” which has frequent quakes and many active volcanoes.
  • Both can be highly destructive to local environments, damaging buildings, infrastructure, and ecosystems, and can threaten human life.
  • Both can trigger secondary hazards, like landslides and tsunamis in the case of large earthquakes, and ash falls, mudflows, and landslides for volcanoes.

In many places, if you map big earthquakes and active volcanoes on a globe, their patterns almost overlap, because the same deep Earth forces are driving both.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.