Railway
About 75 percent of the world's active and dormant volcanoes are located along the:
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Answer: Option B — Ring of Fire
Detailed Solution
The Pacific Ring of Fire is a horseshoe-shaped belt about 40,000 km long around the edges of the Pacific Ocean, where about 75 percent of the world's volcanoes are located and about 90 percent of the world's earthquakes occur.
Where the Ring of Fire runs:
- Along the western coasts of South and North America, including the Andes, Central America, Mexico, the Cascade Range of the USA and Alaska.
- Across the Aleutian Islands to the Kamchatka Peninsula of Russia.
- Down through Japan, the Philippines and Indonesia, to New Zealand.
Why it has so many volcanoes and earthquakes:
- The Ring of Fire follows the boundaries of the Pacific Plate and several smaller plates, such as the Nazca, Cocos, Juan de Fuca and Philippine Sea plates.
- Along most of these boundaries, oceanic plates sink beneath other plates.
- The sinking plates produce deep ocean trenches, powerful earthquakes and chains of volcanoes.
Famous volcanoes of the Ring of Fire:
- Mount Fuji (Japan).
- Mount St Helens (USA), which erupted violently in 1980.
- Mount Pinatubo (Philippines), whose 1991 eruption cooled global temperatures.
- Cotopaxi (Ecuador) and Popocatepetl (Mexico).
Major earthquakes along the Ring of Fire:
- The 1960 Valdivia earthquake in Chile (magnitude 9.5), the strongest ever recorded.
- The 1964 Alaska earthquake (magnitude 9.2).
- The 2011 Tohoku earthquake in Japan (magnitude 9.0).
Other volcanic belts:
The Alpine-Himalayan belt (Mediterranean belt), from the Mediterranean through Turkey and Iran to the Himalayas and Indonesia, accounts for most of the remaining large earthquakes. Volcanoes such as Vesuvius and Etna lie in its western part.
The Mid-Atlantic Ridge has volcanoes such as those of Iceland.
The East African Rift has volcanoes such as Kilimanjaro.
Hotspot volcanoes, such as those of Hawaii, lie in the middle of plates.
Why not the other options?
- ✗The Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the Alpine-Himalayan belt and the East African Rift have volcanoes, but far fewer than the Ring of Fire.
Quick tip
Remember: Ring of Fire = around the Pacific; about 75 percent of volcanoes and 90 percent of earthquakes; caused by subduction.
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Earth: Structure, Rocks & Landforms — Preparation
This question tests your understanding of Earth: Structure, Rocks & Landforms, a key topic in the General Knowledge section. The detailed solution above uses a step-by-step approach to show the reasoning, and where available, a shortcut that helps you solve similar questions in under 90 seconds during the actual exam.
This topic covers the interior of the Earth (crust, mantle and core), types of rocks, plate tectonics and continental drift, earthquakes and volcanoes, and the landforms created by rivers, glaciers, wind and waves. Questions frequently ask about the layers of the Earth and their discontinuities, the three types of rocks (igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic), the Pacific 'Ring of Fire', and which agent forms which landform, such as river meanders and oxbow lakes or glacial cirques and moraines. Alfred Wegener proposed the continental drift theory in 1912. Practise the Earth's structure and landforms questions below, written in the style of the general awareness sections of exams such as SSC, banking, railways, CUET GAT, MAH CET and CLAT. Each question comes with a detailed explanation that adds related facts, so every question helps you revise more than one point.