美国有线新闻 CNN 印尼发生6.5级地震 救援工作仍在紧张进行（在线收听）

First story takes us to the fifth most populated country in the world, the Pacific island nation of Indonesia, home to more than 258 million people, and some of them are struggling with the devastation of another earthquake. A 6.5 magnitude quake shook the far northwestern part of Indonesia Wednesday morning. The tremor was shallow, meaning its focus was relatively close to the earth surface and NOAA officials said last night that at least 97 people have been killed. They expected that number to go up as they search through the rubble.

An Indonesian government official says the priority now is search and rescue, and that authorities have to move fast. Hundreds of buildings have been destroyed, and though there was no tsunami warning, some Indonesian still fled to higher ground with the memory of the 2004 earthquake and tsunami that killed more than 80,000 people and left millions homeless.

Earthquakes are common in Indonesia, because of the country's location on the Pacific Ring of Fire.

SUBTITLE: What is the "Ring of Fire"?

CHAD MYERS, CNN METEOROLOGIST: There's one thing you need to know about the Ring of Fire, it produces 90 percent of the world's earthquakes.

The Ring of Fire includes about 250 volcanoes. Many of them are submarine volcanoes, meaning they're underwater, as are 75 percent of the world's volcanoes in total.

Now, the Ring of Fire is also called the Circum Pacific Belt. It's a result of plate tectonics. The movement of the plates has created a nearly continuous series of oceanic trenches and chains of volcanoes, stretching for 25,000 miles in a horseshoe shape pattern from New Zealand, past Japan, across the Bering Strait and down toward the tip of South America.

The plate movement also causes earthquakes, because many of these earthquakes occur in the ocean, the Ring of Fire is also known for tsunamis produced when the ocean floor is either forced to rise or fall. When the mega thrust event happens in this region, the water is displaced, and the water pushes ashore.

Most tsunamis are only a few inches high, but there are times that that wave and that swell can be as tall as buildings.