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The South American plate is a major tectonic plate which includes the continent of South America as well as a sizable region of the Atlantic Ocean seabed extending eastward to the African plate, with which it forms the southern part of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
Geologists generally agree that the following tectonic plates currently exist on Earth's surface with roughly definable boundaries. Tectonic plates are sometimes subdivided into three fairly arbitrary categories: major (or primary) plates, minor (or secondary) plates, and microplates (or tertiary plates).
The Nazca plate or Nasca plate, [2] named after the Nazca region of southern Peru, is an oceanic tectonic plate in the eastern Pacific Ocean basin off the west coast of South America. The ongoing subduction, along the Peru–Chile Trench, of the Nazca plate under the South American plate is largely responsible for the Andean orogeny.
The Antarctic Plate started to subduct beneath South American 14 million years ago in the Miocene epoch. At first it subducted only in the southernmost tip of Patagonia, meaning that the Chile Triple Junction lay near the Strait of Magellan.
Plate tectonics within Colombia.. Geology of Colombia refers to the geological composition of the Republic of Colombia that determines its geography.Most of the emerged territory of Colombia covers vast areas within the South American Plate, whereas much submerged territory lies within the Caribbean Plate and the Nazca Plate.
It is considered to be a separate tectonic plate to the neighboring South American Plate, and contains several oceanic islands of the South Pacific, which have been associated with both Oceania and South America. The Galápagos Islands and Malpelo Island in the southeastern Pacific Ocean are possessions of Ecuador and Colombia, respectively ...
The trench is also a part of the Chile triple junction, an unusual junction that consists of a mid-oceanic ridge and the Chile Rise being subducted under the South American plate at the Peru–Chile Trench. Two seamount ridges within the Nazca plate enter the subduction zone along this trench: the Nazca Ridge and the Juan Fernández Ridge.
The Great American Biotic Interchange (commonly abbreviated as GABI), also known as the Great American Interchange and the Great American Faunal Interchange, was an important late Cenozoic paleozoogeographic biotic interchange event in which land and freshwater fauna migrated from North America to South America via Central America and vice ...