Earth Science
Ring of Fire
Ring of Fire originally aired on the National Geographic Channel in August, 2007 as part of the Naked Science series produced by Ben Fox and Ian Hunt. The hour-long Ring of Fire program focuses on scientific efforts to understand the danger posed by the 25,000-mile long chain of volcanoes and earthquakes that makes up the Ring of Fire. The video explores scientific explanations for a rise in volcanic activity throughout the Ring of Fire, and discusses ways of predicting future volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and tsunamis.
The Ring of Fire is a horseshoe shaped region surrounding the Pacific basin that comprises 90% of the world's volcanoes, and 80% of the world's largest earthquakes. The Ring of Fire is associated with a nearly continuous series of oceanic trenches, island arcs, and volcanic mountain ranges and plate movements. It is also known as the Pacific Ring of Fire, Circum-Pacific belt or the Circum-Pacific seismic belt (Crystalinks, 2011).
Plate tectonics and the movement and collision of crustal plates are responsible for the Ring of Fire, including two areas that the video Ring of Fire focused on, the Pacific northwest and Japan. A portion of the Pacific plate, along with the small Juan de Fuca plate, is being subducted beneath the North American plate. Further west, the Pacific plate is being subducted along the Kamchatka-Kurile Islands arcs south of Japan (Crystalinks, 2011).
The Ring of Fire is also home to one third of the global population. The video describes a series of scientific discoveries that indicate drastically increased volcanic and seismic activity in this region. New York University scientist Mike Rampino studied ice core samples covering an 11,000-year period from the U.S. National Ice Core Lab that revealed significantly higher levels of sulfur dioxide. These findings could only result from volcanic eruptions, with the samples clearly showing an increase in volcanic activity of 300% over the past two thousand years.
The video also explored recent tectonic activity in several fault areas. Scientists in the video focused on the Cascadia fault, a 680-mile long area located about 50 miles off the Pacific...
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