<i>'Ring of Fire' shows its power with Peru quake </i>

Peru has become the latest country to feel the renewed heat from the "Ring of Fire" that unleashes earthquakes around the Pacific almost every day.
At least 337 people were killed and several hundred injured, according to Peruvian authorities after the 7.9-magnitude quake rattled the country late Wednesday. Several cities were devastated and aftershocks measured up to 6.3, according to the US Geological Survey.
The Ring of Fire stretches along the western coast of the Americas through the island nations of the South Pacific and on through Southeast Asia. It is a series of fault lines in the hardened upper layers of the Earth's crust.
These lines of weakness are the meeting points of huge continental plates that make up the crust and which literally float on the molten rock of the Earth's core.
These plates are in constant motion, clashing into each other or moving away from each other, creating stresses and pressure build-ups at their margins.
This stress is released through volcanic eruptions, when the molten rock is ejected as magma through fissures in the crust, or via earthquakes, when the pressure causes the crust to buckle and shift.
Most of these seismic events are small and occur under the sea, where the majority of the continental plate margins are found.
But occasionally they generate volcanic explosions, earthquakes or landslides.
Although this activity is the result of the weak points in the Earth's surface, experts are not convinced that they create a ripple, or domino effect, of one quake setting off another.
"Earthquakes do tend to happen in clusters but they aren't triggered by one another," according to Gary Gibson, professor of seismology at the RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.