What are the causes of the earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic activity in the Aleutian Islands area?
To simplify the discussion and make it easy to understand, we should see that the earth’s crust is in a constant state of very slow movement over a molten core. The crust is relatively thin and composed of many different plates, some under the continents and some under the oceans. Since all of these plates are in slow movement relative to each other, they either move against each other or slide by each other. So the boundaries where the plates meet is where “all the action is”. The Aleutian Islands are located on such a boundary of two converging plates where the Pacific Plate actually dives down under the North American Plate, under the Bering Sea. USGS (U.S. Geological Survey) describes the process in this way: “Subduction processes in oceanic-oceanic plate convergence also result in the formation of volcanoes. Over millions of years, the erupted lava and volcanic debris pile up on the ocean floor until a submarine volcano rises above sea level to form an island volcano. Such volcano
