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Plate motions range from 10 to 40 millimetres per year (0.4 to 1.6 in/year) at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge (about as fast as fingernails grow), to about 160 millimetres per year (6.3 in/year) for the Nazca plate (about as fast as hair grows). [9] [10]
The North American plate is a tectonic plate containing most of North America, Cuba, the Bahamas, extreme northeastern Asia, and parts of Iceland and the Azores.With an area of 76 million km 2 (29 million sq mi), it is the Earth's second largest tectonic plate, behind the Pacific plate (which borders the plate to the west).
The Antarctic plate is a tectonic plate containing the continent of Antarctica, the Kerguelen Plateau, and some remote islands in the Southern Ocean and other surrounding oceans. After breakup from Gondwana (the southern part of the supercontinent Pangea ), the Antarctic plate began moving the continent of Antarctica south to its present ...
The absolute motion of the Nazca plate has been calibrated at 3.7 cm/year (1.5 in/year) east motion (88°), one of the fastest absolute motions of any tectonic plate. The subducting Nazca plate, which exhibits unusual flat slab subduction, is tearing as well as deforming as
On a global scale, surface expression of this convection is the tectonic plate motions and therefore has speeds of a few cm per year. [15] [16] [17] Speeds can be faster for small-scale convection occurring in low viscosity regions beneath the lithosphere, and slower in the lowermost mantle where viscosities are larger. A single shallow ...
In the western Mediterranean, the relative motions of the Eurasian and African plates produce a combination of lateral and compressive forces, concentrated in a zone known as the Azores–Gibraltar Fault Zone. Along its northeast margin, the African plate is bounded by the Red Sea Rift where the Arabian plate is moving away from the African plate.
The plate formed because the triple junction had converted to an unstable form surrounded on all sides by transform faults, due to the development of a kink in one of the plate boundaries. The "Pacific Triangle", the oldest part of the Pacific plate, created during the initial stages of plate formation, is located just east of the Mariana ...
The Gorda plate, located beneath the Pacific Ocean off the coast of northern California, is one of the northern remnants of the Farallon plate. It is sometimes referred to (by, for example, publications from the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program) [ 1 ] as simply the southernmost portion of the neighboring Juan de Fuca plate , another Farallon ...