On Earth, volcanism occurs in several distinct geologic settings. Most of these are associated with the boundaries of the enormous, rigid plates that make up the lithosphere—the crust and upper mantle. The majority of active terrestrial volcanoes (roughly 80 percent) and related phenomena occur where two lithospheric plates converge and one overrides the other, forcing it down into the mantle to be reabsorbed. Long curved chains of islands known as island arcs (island arc) form at such subduction zones. Volcanoes of the explosive type make up many of the islands of a single arc or the inner row of islands of a double arc. All such islands that border the Pacific basin are built up from the seafloor, usually by the extrusion of basaltic and andesitic magmas (magma).

A second major site of active volcanism is along the axis of the oceanic ridge (ocean) system, where the plates move apart on both sides of the ridge and magma wells up from the mantle, creating new ocean floor along the trailing edges of both plates. Virtually all of this volcanic activity occurs underwater. In a few places the oceanic ridges are sufficiently elevated above the deep seafloor that they emerge from the ocean, and subaerial volcanism occurs. Iceland is the best-known example. The magmas that are erupted along the oceanic ridges are basaltic in composition.

A relatively small number of volcanoes occur within plates far from their margins. Some, as exemplified by the volcanic islands of Hawaii that lie in the interior of the Pacific Plate, are thought to occur because of plate movement over a “hot spot” from which magmas can penetrate to the surface. These magmas characteristically generate a chain of progressively older volcanoes that mark the direction of past motion of the plate over a particular hot spot. The active volcanoes of the East African Rift Valley (East African Rift System) also occur within a plate (the African Plate), but they appear to result from a different mechanism—possibly the beginning of a new region of plates moving apart.