No, not because huge dinosaurs are crawling out of it, as in the movie of the same title, but because there are a lot of earthquakes and active volcanoes in this vast area of our Earth. Plus, compared to the reality of how dangerous it is, a surprising number of people live in countries along the Ring of Fire.
One of the most dangerous places on Earth is also one of the most densely populated
According to the iflscience.com article, if someone looks closely at the North American continent this Saturday, they will also see a ring of fire around the moon, but it will not have any effect on us humans. But this is not the case with the terrestrial ring of fire, which without exaggeration affects the lives of hundreds of millions.
This ring is actually the meeting of the Pacific Plate and the surrounding Earth’s plates. Continental plates push toward or rub against the ocean and move away from it in opposite directions.
Of course, this is not a perfect circle, but it is roughly a shape resembling the legs of a running dog that covers a vast area of our Earth. It will start from the northeastern part of Australia, pass through Indonesia and Japan, and reach Alaska via Kamchatka to extend along the entire western part of the American continent to the extreme south of the Andes. There is no meeting of plates of this type in one place: in the south, in the direction of Antarctica, although some researchers suspect that the continuity is due to the Antarctic plate.
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Location of the most powerful earthquakes and volcanic eruptions
Because of this collision between rock plates, this area is the most volcanic area on Earth, and two-thirds of active volcanoes from Australia to South America are located in this ring of fire. It is no coincidence that he has inspired the director of many films, for example the film with a similar title, Ring of Fire.
Source: Wikimedia
In the past 10,000 years, there have been 13 volcanic eruptions of magnitude 7 on our planet, 11 of which occurred in this Ring of Fire. So, if something similar happens in our lives, there’s a good chance it will happen here. To give you an idea of the scale, a 7 magnitude eruption was so powerful that it caused a volcanic winter in 536, causing global cooling. But something similar happened during the eruption of Tambora in Indonesia in 1815, and as a result the summer was lost that year. The eruption of the Krakatau volcano in 1883 killed 36,000 people within a few hours and caused a huge tsunami. Today, the number of people living in this region is much greater than it was then, because Indonesia is already the fourth most populous country in the world with about 280 million people.
And then we didn’t even talk about the fact that the 9.0 magnitude earthquake was only in this area.
