Ring of Fire is a 1991 documentary film in IMAX format. It looks at some of the varieties of volcanism and earthquake activity in the Ring of Fire, around the Pacific Rim. The film runs 40 minutes.
The film has eight main segments, corresponding to chapters in the DVD release:
1. Ring of Fire: an overview of the region using wireframe computer animation, and including footage of Hawaiian lava flows as an illustration of how early Earth might have looked. Footage of a new volcano in Chile is also shown.
3. Mount St. Helens: includes IMAX footage from about 10 years after the 1980 eruption, and the famous time sequence of the eruption taken at the time.
5. Learning to Live With a Volcano: life in Sakurajima, an island in Japan where eruptions are almost constant and evacuation drills are an annual event; sulfur mining at Kawah Ijen.
6. Buddhas Keep Watch: Using the temple of Borobudur and the BalineseKecak dance as a frame, shows how Indonesians live with the simultaneous threat and fertility provided by their volcanoes.
7. The Center of the Ring: Looks at volcanism on Hawaii, especially Kilauea and Mauna Loa, Footage includes roads, houses and cars destroyed by advancing lava, and underwater lava flows.
8. End Credits
Ring of Fire was released as a VHS video in 1995, and as a DVD in 1997 (rereleased in 2006). It was released on Blu-ray on July 12, 2011, and is also available in HD from the iTunes Store.
A caldera is a large cauldron-like hollow that forms shortly after the emptying of a magma chamber in a volcanic eruption. An eruption that ejects large volumes of magma over a short period of time can cause significant detriment to the structural integrity of such a chamber, greatly diminishing its capacity to support its own roof, and any substrate or rock resting above. The ground surface then collapses into the emptied or partially emptied magma chamber, leaving a large depression at the surface. Although sometimes described as a crater, the feature is actually a type of sinkhole, as it is formed through subsidence and collapse rather than an explosion or impact. Compared to the thousands of volcanic eruptions that occur over the course of a century, the formation of a caldera is a rare event, occurring only a few times within a given window of 100 years. Only eight caldera-forming collapses are known to have occurred between 1911 and 2018, with a caldera collapse at Kīlauea, Hawaii in 2018. Volcanoes that have formed a caldera are sometimes described as "caldera volcanoes".
A volcano is a rupture in the crust of a planetary-mass object, such as Earth, that allows hot lava, volcanic ash, and gases to escape from a magma chamber below the surface. The process that forms volcanoes is called volcanism.
The Ring of Fire is a tectonic belt of volcanoes and earthquakes.
A shield volcano is a type of volcano named for its low profile, resembling a shield lying on the ground. It is formed by the eruption of highly fluid lava, which travels farther and forms thinner flows than the more viscous lava erupted from a stratovolcano. Repeated eruptions result in the steady accumulation of broad sheets of lava, building up the shield volcano's distinctive form.
Kīlauea is an active shield volcano in the Hawaiian Islands. It is located along the southeastern shore of Hawaii Island. The volcano is between 210,000 and 280,000 years old and grew above sea level about 100,000 years ago. Since the islands were settled, it has been the most active of the five volcanoes that together form the island and among the most active volcanoes on Earth. The most recent eruption occurred on June 3, 2024, along fissures that opened on the volcano's southwest rift zone.
Parícutin is a cinder cone volcano located in the Mexican state of Michoacán, near the city of Uruapan and about 322 kilometers (200 mi) west of Mexico City. The volcano surged suddenly from the cornfield of local farmer Dionisio Pulido in 1943, attracting both popular and scientific attention.
The Yellowstone Caldera, sometimes referred to as the Yellowstone Supervolcano, is a volcanic caldera and supervolcano in Yellowstone National Park in the Western United States. The caldera and most of the park are located in the northwest corner of the state of Wyoming. The caldera measures 43 by 28 miles, and postcaldera lavas spill out a significant distance beyond the caldera proper.
Catherine Joséphine "Katia" Krafft and her husband, Maurice Paul Krafft were French volcanologists and filmmakers who died in a pyroclastic flow on Mount Unzen, Nagasaki, Japan, on 3 June 1991. The Kraffts became well known as pioneers in the filming, photographing, and recording of volcanoes, often coming within feet of lava flows. Their obituary appeared in the Bulletin of Volcanology. Since their deaths, their work has been featured in two documentary films by Werner Herzog, Into the Inferno (2016) and The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft (2022), and a further film, Fire of Love (2022), depicted their lives, relationship and careers using their archived footage.
Volcano is a 1997 American disaster film directed by Mick Jackson, written by Jerome Armstrong and Billy Ray, and produced by Neal H. Moritz and Andrew Z. Davis. The film stars Tommy Lee Jones, Anne Heche, Don Cheadle and Keith David. It tells the story of an effort to divert the path of a dangerous lava flow through the streets of Los Angeles following the formation of a volcano at the La Brea Tar Pits. The story was inspired by the 1943 formation of the Parícutin volcano in Mexico.
The evolution of Hawaiian volcanoes occurs in several stages of growth and decline. The fifteen volcanoes that make up the eight principal islands of Hawaii are the youngest in a chain of more than 129 volcanoes that stretch 5,800 kilometers (3,600 mi) across the North Pacific Ocean, called the Hawaiian–Emperor seamount chain. Hawaiʻi's volcanoes rise an average of 4,600 meters (15,000 ft) to reach sea level from their base. The largest, Mauna Loa, is 4,169 meters (13,678 ft) high. As shield volcanoes, they are built by accumulated lava flows, growing a few meters or feet at a time to form a broad and gently sloping shape.
Pico do Fogo is an active stratovolcano located on the island of Fogo, Cape Verde, rising to 2,829 metres (9,281 ft) above sea level. The main cone last erupted in 1680, causing mass emigration from the island. A subsidiary vent erupted in 1995. The only deadly eruption was in 1847 when earthquakes killed several people.
Submarine volcanoes are underwater vents or fissures in the Earth's surface from which magma can erupt. Many submarine volcanoes are located near areas of tectonic plate formation, known as mid-ocean ridges. The volcanoes at mid-ocean ridges alone are estimated to account for 75% of the magma output on Earth. Although most submarine volcanoes are located in the depths of seas and oceans, some also exist in shallow water, and these can discharge material into the atmosphere during an eruption. The total number of submarine volcanoes is estimated to be over one million of which some 75,000 rise more than 1 kilometre (0.62 mi) above the seabed. Only 119 submarine volcanoes in Earth's oceans and seas are known to have erupted during the last 11,700 years.
The Northern Cordilleran Volcanic Province (NCVP), formerly known as the Stikine Volcanic Belt, is a geologic province defined by the occurrence of Miocene to Holocene volcanoes in the Pacific Northwest of North America. This belt of volcanoes extends roughly north-northwest from northwestern British Columbia and the Alaska Panhandle through Yukon to the Southeast Fairbanks Census Area of far eastern Alaska, in a corridor hundreds of kilometres wide. It is the most recently defined volcanic province in the Western Cordillera. It has formed due to extensional cracking of the North American continent—similar to other on-land extensional volcanic zones, including the Basin and Range Province and the East African Rift. Although taking its name from the Western Cordillera, this term is a geologic grouping rather than a geographic one. The southmost part of the NCVP has more, and larger, volcanoes than does the rest of the NCVP; further north it is less clearly delineated, describing a large arch that sways westward through central Yukon.
Several types of volcanic eruptions—during which material is expelled from a volcanic vent or fissure—have been distinguished by volcanologists. These are often named after famous volcanoes where that type of behavior has been observed. Some volcanoes may exhibit only one characteristic type of eruption during a period of activity, while others may display an entire sequence of types all in one eruptive series.
The Silverthrone Caldera is a potentially active caldera complex in southwestern British Columbia, Canada, located over 350 kilometres (220 mi) northwest of the city of Vancouver and about 50 kilometres (31 mi) west of Mount Waddington in the Pacific Ranges of the Coast Mountains. The caldera is one of the largest of the few calderas in western Canada, measuring about 30 kilometres (19 mi) long (north-south) and 20 kilometres (12 mi) wide (east-west). Mount Silverthrone, an eroded lava dome on the caldera's northern flank that is 2,864 metres (9,396 ft) high, may be the highest volcano in Canada.
The Mount Cayley volcanic field (MCVF) is a remote volcanic zone on the South Coast of British Columbia, Canada, stretching 31 km (19 mi) from the Pemberton Icefield to the Squamish River. It forms a segment of the Garibaldi Volcanic Belt, the Canadian portion of the Cascade Volcanic Arc, which extends from Northern California to southwestern British Columbia. Most of the MCVF volcanoes were formed during periods of volcanism under sheets of glacial ice throughout the last glacial period. These subglacial eruptions formed steep, flat-topped volcanoes and subglacial lava domes, most of which have been entirely exposed by deglaciation. However, at least two volcanoes predate the last glacial period and both are highly eroded. The field gets its name from Mount Cayley, a volcanic peak located at the southern end of the Powder Mountain Icefield. This icefield covers much of the central portion of the volcanic field and is one of the several glacial fields in the Pacific Ranges of the Coast Mountains.
An eruption at the Cumbre Vieja volcanic ridge, comprising the southern half of the Spanish island of La Palma in the Canary Islands, took place between 19 September and 13 December 2021. It was the first volcanic eruption on the island since the eruption of Teneguía in 1971. At 85 days, it is the longest known and the most damaging volcanic eruption on La Palma since records began. The total damage caused by the volcano amounts up to 843 million euros.
The 1917 San Salvador earthquake occurred on June 7 at 18:55 local time near the Salvadoran capital. The hypocenter of the Mw 6.7 was at a shallow depth of 15 km (9.3 mi), and occurred along a shallow crustal fault near San Salvador. The earthquake caused significant destruction of the city and left approximately 1,050 dead. It was followed by an eruption on San Salvador that killed another 1,100. Only behind the earthquake of 1986, it is the second deadliest in El Salvador's history.
The 2022 eruption of Mauna Loa was an episode of eruptive volcanic activity at Mauna Loa, the world's largest active volcano, located on Hawaiʻi island, Hawaiʻi. Mauna Loa began to erupt shortly before midnight HST on November 27, 2022, when lava flows emerged from fissure vents in Moku‘āweoweo. It marked the first eruption at the volcano in 38 years. The eruption ended on December 13, 2022, after more than two weeks.
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