The Ring of Fire is located around the edges of the Pacific Ocean, forming a vast horseshoe-shaped zone that fringes the Pacific basin. It stretches for about 25,000 miles (40,000 km) from the western coasts of North and South America, up through Alaska, across to eastern Asia, and down through Southeast Asia to New Zealand.

What and where it is

  • The Ring of Fire is a seismically active belt of volcanoes, deep ocean trenches, and earthquake zones encircling the Pacific Ocean.
  • It runs along countries such as Chile, the United States (West Coast and Alaska), Canada’s West Coast, Russia’s Far East, Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and New Zealand.

Key geographic path

  • In the Americas, it follows the Andes in South America up through Central America, Mexico, California, the Pacific Northwest, and Alaska’s Aleutian Islands.
  • In Asia–Oceania, it continues along Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, Japan, the Kuril and Mariana island arcs, the Philippines, Indonesia, and then south to New Zealand.

Why this area matters

  • About 75% of the world’s volcanoes and the majority of its strongest earthquakes occur within the Ring of Fire.
  • This concentration happens because many tectonic plates meet and collide here, causing subduction, which fuels intense volcanic and earthquake activity.

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