Ring of Fire Map

Last updated 11 October 2026

What the map shows

The Ring of Fire Ring of Fire. The belt of volcanic arcs and ocean trenches that partly rings the Pacific Ocean, where earthquakes and eruptions are frequent. Source is a chain of ocean trenches and volcanic arcs Volcanic arc. A curved chain of volcanoes that runs parallel to an ocean trench, always on the landward side, fed by the plate sinking below it. Source that partly circles the Pacific Ocean. USGS calls it a zone of frequent earthquakes and eruptions. Almost every part of it is a subduction zone, where one plate sinks under another. The blue lines are the subduction boundaries of the PB2002 plate model that face the Pacific basin, 41,188 km in all. The red dots are volcanoes from the NOAA NCEI database that sit within 450 km of those lines.

The ring starts at New Zealand and Tonga, runs through Papua New Guinea, the Philippines and Japan, crosses the Kuril Islands and Kamchatka to the Aleutians and Alaska, then follows the west coast of the Americas down to southern Chile. On the way it borders the Pacific, Philippine Sea, Nazca and Cocos plates.

The dashed line is the Sunda arc, where the Australian and Indian plates sink under Sumatra and Java. It joins the ring in eastern Indonesia, but it faces the Indian Ocean, so we count it apart. Gray dots are volcanoes away from both, such as Iceland, Hawaii and the East African Rift.

Key facts

1. PB2002 has 41,188 km of subduction zone around the Pacific, 80% of all subduction zones on Earth. Bird (2003)
2. 949 of the 1,603 volcanoes in the NOAA database (59%) sit within 450 km of a Pacific-rim subduction zone. NOAA NCEI Volcano Locations Database
3. Russia has the most Ring of Fire volcanoes in the database (163), then United States (143) and Japan (111).
4. More of these volcanoes stand on the Okhotsk Plate (214) than on any other plate. Volcanoes rise on the plate above the one that sinks. USGS, Understanding plate motions
5. The volcanic arcs always run parallel to the ocean trenches and on their landward side, as the Aleutian Islands do along the Aleutian Trench. USGS, Ring of Fire
6. Japan alone has more than 75 active volcanoes, according to USGS. The NOAA list counts 111 Japanese volcanoes in the Ring of Fire. USGS, Plate tectonics and people
7. Ring of Fire earthquakes send tsunamis across the whole ocean: the waves from the 1960 Chile earthquake killed 61 people in Hawaii. USGS, Tsunamis and the Ring of Fire

Ring of Fire volcanoes by country

Each country with at least one volcano in the ring or on the Sunda arc. Country names are as NOAA records them; volcanoes on the open sea floor are listed under the ocean. Sort by any column.

Data source: NOAA NCEI Volcano Locations Database, Public domain (US Government work). Download: GeoJSON , Volcanoes CSV .

Ring of Fire volcanoes by plate

The plate under each volcano, from the PB2002 plate outlines. Most sit on the upper plate of a subduction zone, so the sinking plates, Pacific and Nazca, carry few.

Data source: PB2002 plate model, Bird (2003), converted by Hugo Ahlenius, Nordpil, ODC-By 1.0.

Highest Ring of Fire volcanoes

Data source: NOAA NCEI Volcano Locations Database, Public domain (US Government work).

Download the data

ring-of-fire-subduction.geojson holds the subduction lines, each with its plate pair, length and group (Ring of Fire or Sunda arc), under the PB2002 license, ODC-By 1.0. volcanoes-ncei.csv lists every volcano with type, status, plate, distance to the nearest subduction zone and Ring of Fire flag. The NOAA data is public domain. Credit lines are on the data credits page.

Next: see where the Ring of Fire is in questions and answers, every volcano by type on the volcano map, this month's quakes on the earthquake map, or all plates on the tectonic plates map.