Ring of Fire world's 25 largest volcanic eruptions of the last 11,700 years occurred at volcanoes in the Ring of Fire. The famous and very active San Andreas Fault zone of California is a transform fault which offsets a portion of the East Pacific Rise under the southwestern United States and Mexico; the motion of the fault generates numerous small earthquakes, at multiple times a day, most of which are too small to be felt. The active Queen Charlotte Fault on the west coast of the Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, has generated three large earthquakes during the 20th century: a magnitude 7 event
Alpide belt by ongoing plate tectonics such as the Alpine orogeny. The belt is the result of Mesozoic-to-Cenozoic-to-recent closure of the Tethys Ocean and process of collision between the northward-moving African, Arabian and Indian plates with the Eurasian plate. Indonesia lies between the Pacific Ring of Fire along the northeastern islands adjacent to and including New Guinea and the Alpide belt along the south and west from Sumatra, Java and the Lesser Sunda Islands (Bali, Flores, and Timor). The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake just off the coast of Sumatra was located within the Alpide belt. Alpide belt The Alpide belt or Alpine-Himalayan