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The Cocos plate is a young oceanic tectonic plate beneath the Pacific Ocean off the west coast of Central America, named for Cocos Island, which rides upon it. The Cocos plate was created approximately 23 million years ago when the Farallon plate broke into two pieces, which also created the Nazca plate .
The Cocos–Nazca spreading centre (or the Cocos–Nazca spreading system) is the divergent boundary between the Cocos and Nazca plates. It extends from close to the East Pacific Rise northwest of the Galápagos Islands , to the southeastern end of the Middle America Trench offshore Panama .
Cocos Island is an oceanic island of both volcanic and tectonic origin. It is the only emergent island of the Cocos Plate, one of the minor tectonic plates. Potassium-argon dating established the age of the oldest rocks between 1.91 and 2.44 million years (Late Pliocene) [19] and it is composed primarily of basalt, which is formed by cooling lava.
These smaller plates are often not shown on major plate maps, as the majority of them do not comprise significant land area. For purposes of this list, a minor plate is any plate with an area less than 20 million km 2 (7.7 million sq mi) but greater than 1 million km 2 (0.39 million sq mi).
The trench is colored in dark blue, extending from central Mexico to Costa Rica in the Pacific Ocean The trench lies at the convergence of the Cocos, Nazca, North American, and Caribbean plates The Middle America Trench is a major subduction zone, an oceanic trench in the eastern Pacific Ocean off the southwestern coast of Middle America ...
The Caribbean plate is a mostly oceanic tectonic plate underlying Central America and the Caribbean Sea off the northern coast of South America. Roughly 3.2 million square kilometres (1.2 million square miles) in area, the Caribbean plate borders the North American plate, the South American plate, the Nazca plate and the Cocos plate.
Furthermore, the subduction of the Cocos tectonic plate itself is not thought to be what caused some of the changes in volcanism associated with the Central American Volcanic Arc; while the subduction of the Cocos Ridge is a continual event that has influenced volcanism in Central America, the subduction of the Coiba Ridge—a microplate in the ...
During the Oligocene, the offshore Pacific Plate fragmented into the Cocos Plate and Nazca Plate, divided by the east-west Colon spreading ridge. The tectonics of Costa Rica are more complicated because the Cocos Plate subdivided into two blocks separated by the Costa Rica Fracture Zone (running northeast onto land), with the northern block ...