A 40,000 km line along the Pacific Rim, known as the "ring of fire," is the most geologically active place on earth.
Earthquake activity has returned to the Pacific Ring of Fire, and now a new study has backed up fears that a huge tremor is on the way.
Over the past few weeks, quakes have hit near Japan, Guam and Taiwan around the planet's so-called "Ring of Fire" - a horseshoe-shaped geological disaster zone.
Roughly 90 per cent of the world's earthquakes occur in the Ring of Fire - a Pacific region home to three in four of the world's active volcanoes.
The ring loops from New Zealand to Chile, passing through the coasts of Asia and the Americas on the way.
The region is susceptible to disasters because it is home to a vast number of "subduction zones", areas where tectonic plates overlap.
New research in California says aftershocks can occur on the margins of the area in which the quake took place following a cluster of tremors, reports Daily Mail.
There may also be the possibility of a "big one" in the immediate area, according to the researchers.
The study, published in in the journal Science Advances, involved an analysis of 101 major earthquakes around the Pacific Ring of Fire between 1990 and 2016.
It showed that most of the aftershock activity occurred on the margins of the areas where the faults slipped during the main earthquakes.
Most earthquakes occur when tectonic plates meet and slide against each other, and quakes occur when the strength of that movement is greater than the strength of the rocks, causing a failure at what is known as the fault line: a line on a rock surface or the ground.
Pacific Ring of Fire active today. #switch2sendai#earthquake#volcano - PH : Mayon Volcano erupted, 1,000s evacuees - Japan: Volcano causes avalanche, one death - Indonesia: 5.3 earthquake jolts Jakarta, buildings swayed - Alaska: 7.9 Magnitude earthquake led to tsunami alert. pic.twitter.com/q1rz0Dbvxr
This energy is released as shock waves that lead to an earthquake.
"This intuition has been challenged by statistical treatments of seismic data that indicate that, based on the clustering of earthquakes in space and time, the area that has just slipped is actually more likely to have another failure," said Thorne Lay, professor of Earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz.
"The truth appears to be more nuanced.
"Yes, the area that slipped a lot is unlikely to slip again, as the residual stress on the fault has been lowered to well below the failure level, but the surrounding areas have been pushed toward failure in many cases, giving rise to aftershocks and the possibility of an adjacent large rupture sooner rather than later."
Dr Lay told the MailOnline "it is possible (has been observed) that dynamic stresses from large earthquake can trigger relatively widespread earthquake activation clustered in time.
"Seismologists look for effects of such long-range earthquake interactions regularly now.
"Taiwan, Guam and Japan are far apart relative to the static stress interactions, but one could examine the seismic shaking from an earlier event in the region of a later event to see if small earthquakes were triggered as the seismic waves went by which could have led to a cascade of failures culminating in a larger event.
"Until that type of analysis is done, causal connection between the events is very speculative.
"Earthquakes are happening frequently in the Ring of Fire, and some apparent space-time clustering could arise from purely random (non-interacting) activity.
"The most 'predictable' earthquakes are nearby aftershocks; after a large event, seismologists have decent statistical models that indicate how many and what size aftershocks are likely to occur for space-time windows around the source.
"But, the models are not sophisticated enough to tell us whether one of those aftershocks will be 'unusually' big, giving a second large event comparable to or larger than the first."
On January 22, Mount Mayon in the Philippines sent lava more than 600 metres into the air, and over 61,000 people were forced to evacuate. Photo / Getty
Lay and other seismologists at UC Santa Cruz and Caltech took advantage of advanced slip-imaging methods applied to recent earthquakes of magnitude 7 or greater.
They found most aftershock activity occurs on the margins of the area that slipped in the main shock.
"This produces a halo of aftershocks surrounding the rupture and indicates that the large-slip zone is not likely to have immediate rerupture," Lay said.
The findings also suggest that if unusually intense aftershock activity takes place, a large earthquake in the immediate vicinity of the first event might still be possible.
The study comes after a spate of earthquakes took place in Pacific Ring of Fire during the first two weeks of February.
After a series of quakes hit the Ring of Fire in January, a 6.4 quake struck Taiwan's east coast on February 6, killing 17 people and injuring at least 180.
A series of tremors reaching magnitude 5.7, 5.6, 5.4 and 4.9 shook the US island territory of Guam early on Tuesday.
And since February 11, three earthquakes have struck Japan: A 4.8 magnitude quake 103 kilometres from Hachijo, a 4.5 magnitude quake 55 kilometres from Nemuro, and a 4.5 magnitude earthquake 103 kilometres from Tokunoshima.
But scientists say such activity is normal for the Ring of Fire, adding that there is no chance of a "domino effect" triggering a larger quake.
"The Pacific Rim is in a period of activity," Toshiyasu Nagao, head of Tokyo-based Tokai University's Earthquake Prediction Research Centre, told Japan Times.
"In terms of volcanic history, however, the current activity is still regarded as normal."
Anatomy of an earthquake. Graphic / calacademy.org
Dr Janine Krippner, a volcanologist at Concord University in Athens, West Virginia, tweeted: "It's not referred to as the 'ring of fire' because it sits there doing nothing ... it is normal to have so much activity."
At least four natural disasters jolted the Pacific Rim in January, including a 7.9 magnitude earthquake in Kodiak, Alaska, which sparked a tsunami warning.
A 6.4 quake hit Indonesia the same week, and Mount Kusatsu-Shirane in Japan erupted, killing one and injuring 15.
Also in January, Mount Mayon in the Philippines sent lava 600 metres (1,970 ft) into the air, forcing 61,000 people to evacuate from nearby villages as thick smoke descended from the mountain.
Some researchers, however, said that this string of events in January were not connected.
"There's not really likely to be any connection," Professor Chris Elders, a geologist at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, told The New Daily.
"While they do indeed have the same origin - the Ring of Fire - these recent events are a coincidence.
"The region itself is a breeding ground for seismic activity."
Following from January's events, a 6.4 magnitude earthquake struck Taiwan's east coast on February 6, causing a hotel to collapse and injuring at least 180 people and killing 17.
