No, it’s not a scene from a far-off planet in the next Star Wars movie—it’s an island in the Philippines, covered in ash. In January, a volcano called Taal erupted in the Southeast Asian nation, blanketing much of the region in a dusty mix of sharp rock and glass fragments.
Knee-deep in some places, the ash collapsed houses and destroyed crops. It’s also hazardous to breathe. Hundreds of thousands of people were forced to flee. Those who lived closest to the volcano have not been able to return home, because another eruption could occur.
The Philippines is at high risk for volcanic activity. That’s because it’s located in the Ring of Fire, a horseshoe-shaped area along the edge of the Pacific Ocean where several of Earth’s tectonic plates meet. Tectonic plates are giant slabs of underground rock that make up the planet’s crust. When those plates shift and collide, molten rock beneath Earth’s surface, called magma, can burst through the cracks between them, causing volcanoes to erupt. More than 75 percent of the world’s volcanoes are within the Ring of Fire, Taal included.