Ring of Fire

Photo courtesy of Greg Kruk

In Johnny Cash's hit song, the burning Ring of Fire is love. It's also a bizarre drinking game, in which the cards that turn up determine who imbibes what and how much.

In The Jewel in the Crown, a TV series based on Paul Scott's Raj Quartet, a woman places her baby within a ring of fire in a demented attempt to protect him from some unnamed evil.

A recent set of mining claims in Northern Ontario has also been dubbed the ring of fire, along with a U.S. online radio station. The term also refers to the ring of volcanic fire that circles the Pacific Ocean, from New Zealand to Java, up through Japan and Kamchatka, and down again along the west coast of the Americas.

I'm curious about how the varied uses of the term are connected to the geological horseshoe around the Pacific that contains three-quarters of the world's active volcanoes.