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BrainStuff: What Is the Pacific Ring of Fire?
The Ring of Fire is a loop around the Pacific Ocean that's a literal hotbed of volcanoes, earthquakes, hydrothermal vents, and other geologic activity. Learn how the interactions among tectonic plates cause all this mayhem in today's episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geology/ring-of-fire.htm
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
- Duration:
- 12m
- Broadcast on:
- 05 Sep 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
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Spoiler alert, it's got nothing to do with the love song made popular by Johnny Cash, unfortunately. The Ring of Fire hugs the western hosts of South Central and North America, spans Alaska's Aleutian Island arc through Russia's Kanchakka Peninsula, then shoots down through Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and New Zealand. The Ring completes itself by going through northwestern Antarctica, which has a number of volcanoes. All of these areas touch on the Pacific tectonic plate, and a few smaller plates that brush up against it. Okay, you and I live on top of the Earth's lithosphere. Our homeworld's rocky exterior crust, but this layer isn't some rigid single-piece shell. Instead, it's made up of about 15 to 20 tectonic plates, depending on who you ask, that fit together pretty snugly, and slowly drift over the molten materials that lay deeper inside our planet. A heat from the Earth's core causes them to move against one another. Some boundaries between these plates come in three major categories, convergent, divergent, and transform, and the Ring of Fire includes examples of each one. Let's start with divergent boundaries. These occur when two neighboring plates move away from one another. In those areas, molten magma rises up from beneath the plates and eventually hardens to create new crust. Under the Pacific Ocean, the huge Pacific plate is being pushed away from four of its smaller counterparts by the powerful East Pacific Rise. This is a strip of heavy activity that parallels the coast of South America a couple thousand miles out, stretching from the Gulf of California down through Easter Island, approaching Antarctica and New Zealand. Around Easter Island, which is offshore of Chile, we see the fastest expansion of the Earth's crust in the world, over six inches a year, or about 150 millimeters. Divergent boundaries also create hydrothermal vents deep in the ocean that spew material and heat into the water. And researchers have found fascinating ecosystems there, that, unlike any other ecosystem on Earth, doesn't have photosynthesis as its base. These creatures live off the vents, independent of the sun's energy. Next, let's talk about transform boundaries, areas where two plates sideswipe each other. Up in California proper, we have the San Andreas Fault. That's a classic transform boundary. The state of California is throttled across the Pacific plate and the North American plate. The North American plate is headed south, the Pacific is moving north. A friction between them causes the earthquakes that California is infamous for. But what happens when plates collide head on? That's a convergent boundary, wherein one plate will be driven underneath the other. This point of contact is called a subduction zone. The Pacific plate has a subduction zone at its northwestern rim, along its boundary with the Philippine Sea Plate, which is riding up over the Pacific Plate. This interaction caused part of the Philippine plate to break off millions of years ago, forming a tiny plate in between called the Mariana, which is also riding over the Pacific Plate. And these interactions forged the Mariana Islands, a thousand miles east of the Philippine archipelago, and created the yawning underwater chasm called the Mariana Trench, which contains the deepest point of any ocean on Earth. This floor, named the Challenger Deep, lies some 36,000 feet below sea level that's around 11,000 meters. For contrast, the peak of Mount Everest is only 29,000 feet above sea level, or 9,000 meters, which means the Mariana Trench is significantly deeper than Everest is tall. Around this and other subduction zones, researchers are investigating reservoirs of hot water moving up from the ocean floor as a potential source of geothermal energy. The solar and wind power grab more headlines, but engineers are also working on harnessing these underwater geothermal sources of cleaner energy. Meanwhile, across the ocean, between the southeast part of the Pacific Plate and the South American Continental Plate, there's a smaller oceanic plate called the Nazca. At this very moment, the Nazca Plate is being driven underneath the South American Plate. The convergence process sets off a lot of earthquakes in western South America. It's also uplifting mountains and sending up magma to feed volcanoes. There are some 452 volcanoes, both active and dormant, spread out across throwing a fire, including plenty of vents and fissures that are wrapped underwater. As far as we know, these count for 75% of all volcanic activity in the world. The area also accounts for around 90% of the planet's earthquakes. Some of the worst natural disasters in recorded history, like the 1883 Krakatoa eruption, the 1960 Chile earthquake, and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, had their origins along the ring of fires, tectonic boundaries. However, there are so many small plates and different interaction zones involved in the ring that any disasters that happen on opposite sides of it are just coincidence. A case in point, a series of earthquakes rocked Japan's Kyushu Island in April of 2016. That same month, Chile suffered a quake with a Richter scale magnitude of 7.2. The epicenters were almost 10,000 miles apart, more 16,000 kilometers. Although a strong earthquake can trigger weaker ones in nearby places, the gap between Chile and Japan is far too big for their quakes to be linked. After all, the Pacific is the world's largest ocean, though it may not always retain that title. Due in no small part to all the seduction zones on its flanks, the Pacific might close within the next 250 million years. As Asia, Australia, and the Americas converge, planet Earth may wind up with a new super continent, not too dissimilar from the giant landmass called Pangea that started breaking apart around 200 million years ago. But that's just one hypothesis. Some geologists think that the Atlantic or the Arctic oceans are more likely to disappear than the Pacific. We'll all just have to wait and find out. Today's episode is based on the article "7 Hot Facts About the Pacific Ring of Fire" on howstuffworks.com, written by Marc Mancini. And BrainStuff is production by Heart Radio in partnership with howstuffworks.com, and is produced by Tyler Clang and Ramsay Young. Of four more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. 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