Week 4 Discussion. The Pacific Ring of Fire. Life Sciences Essay

The Pacific Ring of Fire
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The Pacific Ring of Fire
The Pacific Ring of Fire is made up of several volcanoes and active volcanic regions that stretch to approximately 25,000 miles across the Pacific Ocean. A considerable number of tectonic plates such as the Eurasian, Caribbean and Indian plates meet at this point (National Geographic Society, 2019). Consequently, the movement of the tectonic plates sliding, colliding and any other movement leads to volcanic activities, earthquakes and formation of deep trenches along the fault lines where they meet. The area thus becomes an epicenter of earthquakes due to the concentration of seismic activities.
Along the region, volcanoes are formed when tectonic plates converge along fault lines whereby one plate is pushed below another due to gravitational pressure on the mantle in a process called subduction. This leads to the melting of the rocks due to high pressures exerted on them at the convergence zone hence forming magma. This leads to the creation of magma that forms a critical part in formation of volcanoes near the surface of the earth (Grodek, 2020). The movement of tectonic plates over and below each other causes formation of landmasses that develop as an effect of rocks pushed upwards towards and over the earth’s surface. The largest volcanic activity recorded in the history of the earth in 1815 happened in Indonesia, which lies in the area (National Geographic Society, 2019).
On the other hand, earthquakes occur at regions known as transform boundaries in which tectonic plates slide across each other. This action of the plates creates tension along the plates, which may be released, causing earthquakes. As opposed to the process of creating volcanoes, land masses are neither created nor...