In which belt are volcanic eruptions most numerous?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, Circum-Pacific belt. Often called the 'Ring of Fire,' this horseshoe-shaped zone rings the Pacific Ocean along near-continuous subduction zones (the Andes, Central America, the Cascades, the Aleutians, Kamchatka, Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, New Zealand) and hosts roughly three-quarters of the world's active volcanoes, along with the great majority of its earthquakes.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This is the Mid-Continental (Alpide) belt — running from Java through the Himalayas to the Mediterranean — the world's second most active seismic-volcanic zone, but well behind the Circum-Pacific belt in eruption count.  (c) Marks the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a divergent (constructive) plate boundary with volcanism concentrated at spreading centres such as Iceland — active, but far less numerous than the subduction-driven Circum-Pacific belt.  (d) Refers to scattered hotspot volcanism far from plate boundaries (e.g., Hawaii) — a minority of the world's volcanoes and not a continuous belt at all.

Concept: Most of Earth's volcanoes cluster along plate boundaries rather than occurring randomly. Convergent boundaries, where an oceanic plate subducts beneath another plate, generate the most frequent and often most explosive volcanism — and the Pacific Ocean's rim is ringed almost continuously by exactly this kind of boundary, which is why it dominates global eruption counts.

State PCS 2021 Q46 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2021 Q46 — Geography PYQ with Answer