Earthquakes and volcanoes are natural phenomena and are closely linked with seismic events. An earthquake is caused by to release of energy along a fault in the earth’s crust, which generates waves that travel in all directions. A volcano is a place where gases, ashes, and/or molten rock material lava – escape to the ground. The spatial distribution of earthquakes and volcanoes shows a close relation between the two as indicated in the figure below: Most of the largest earthquakes that ever happened on Earth, were along the Circum-Pacific belt, which is also called the ‘Ring of Fire. After this, earthquakes have been more frequent in the Alpide or Alpine-Himalayan earthquake belt, which runs from Java to Sumatra through the Himalayas, the Mediterranean, and out into the Atlantic. The third prominent belt follows the submerged mid-Atlantic Ridge. The map of volcanoes also shows a similar pattern. They are distributed along three major belts or zones in the world, namely- (i) Circum-Pacific belt: Also known as the ‘volcanic zones of the convergent oceanic plate margins’, it includes the volcanoes of the eastern and western coastal areas of the Pacific Ocean, of island arcs and festoons off the east coast of Asia and of the volcanic islands scattered over the Pacific Ocean. (ii) Mid-continental belt: Also known as ‘the volcanic zones of convergent continental plate margins’, it includes the volcanoes of Alpine mountain chains and the Mediterranean Sea and the volcanoes of the fault zone of eastern Africa. (iii) Mid-oceanic ridge belt: This belt includes the volcanoes mainly along the mid-Atlantic ridge which represents the splitting/divergent zone of plates. The spatial distribution of volcanoes and earthquakes show similarities as both events are closely linked with the Theory of Plate Tectonics, which explains the formation of convergent and divergent boundaries and the motion of plates.