• More than 2,100 people living near an erupting volcano — Mount Ruang — on Indonesia’s Sulawesi Island were evacuated due to the dangers of spreading ash, falling rocks, hot volcanic clouds and the possibility of a tsunami.

• Mount Ruang has a peak of 725 metres above sea level.

• Indonesia’s Center for Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation recorded at least three eruptions, with the maximum height of the eruption column reaching 1,200 meters (3,900 feet).

• An international airport in Manado city, less than 100 kilometers from the erupting Mount Ruang, is still temporarily closed as volcanic ash was spewed into the air.

• More than 11,000 people were told to leave their homes that were located in the affected area. A joint team from the local authorities combed the villages surrounding the volcano and evacuated residents to safer areas by boat.

• Officials worry that part of the volcano could collapse into the sea and cause a tsunami, as happened in an eruption there in 1871.

• Indonesia, an archipelago of 270 million people, has 120 active volcanoes. It is prone to volcanic activity because it sits along the Ring of Fire, a horseshoe-shaped series of seismic fault lines around the Pacific Ocean. 

• Indonesia straddles the so-called “Pacific Ring of Fire”, an area of high seismic activity that rests atop multiple tectonic plates.

What is the ‘Ring of Fire’?

• Volcanic arcs and oceanic trenches partly encircling the Pacific Basin form the so-called “Ring of Fire”, a zone of frequent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. 

• It is also referred to as the Circum-Pacific Belt.

• Most of the active volcanoes on Earth are located underwater, along the “Ring of Fire” in the Pacific Ocean.

• Made up of more than 450 volcanoes, the Ring of Fire stretches for nearly 40,250 kilometers, running in the shape of a horseshoe (as opposed to an actual ring) from the southern tip of South America, along the west coast of North America, across the Bering Strait, down through Japan, and into New Zealand.

• Several active and dormant volcanoes in Antarctica, however, “close” the ring.

• The Ring of Fire is the result of plate tectonics. 

• Much of the volcanic activity occurs along subduction zones, which are convergent plate boundaries where two tectonic plates come together. 

• The heavier plate is shoved (or subducted) under the other plate. When this happens, melting of the plates produces magma that rises up through the overlying plate, erupting to the surface as a volcano.

• Subduction zones are also where Earth’s deepest ocean trenches are located and where deep earthquakes happen. The trenches form because as one plate subducts under another, it is bent downward. Earthquakes occur as the two plates scrape against each other and as the subducting plate bends.

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