The Ring of Fire is a horseshoe-shaped tectonic belt of volcanoes and earthquakes that surrounds most of the Pacific Ocean. It stretches about 40,000 km (25,000 miles) and includes active and dormant volcanoes along the west coasts of the Americas, across the Bering Strait, through Japan and the Philippines, down to New Zealand, and around islands in the southwest Pacific Ocean. This belt is the result of numerous tectonic plates subducting beneath others around the Pacific Plate, causing a high level of volcanic and seismic activity.