Modified from Oregon's Island in the Sky: Geology Road Guide to Marys Peak, by Robert J. Lillie, Wells Creek Publishers, 75 pp., 2017, www.amazon.com/dp/1540611965. Find the plate boundary between the Juan de Fuca Plate (JF) and the North American Plate (NA). WrangellSt. On Dec. 15, 1989 a jet with 244 passengers and crew was en route from Amsterdam to Anchorage. Listing total number of features into an ArcGIS Online feature pop-up, Convergent boundaries: where two plates are colliding. The west side of California is moving north, and the east side is moving south. Photo courtesy of Robert J. Lillie. It runs from the tip of South America eastwards to form a barrier between the Antarctic plate and the South America plate. A glance at a map of the western United States might suggest that the Sierra Nevada are a southward continuation of the Cascade Volcanoes. Along this fault, the Pacific plate is moving northwestward relative to the North American plate at an approximate rate of 16.4 feet per 100 years (5 cm/year). Feature labels. Where are Puerto Rico and Hispaniola located on the plate? The resulting magma ascends through the crust, producing a mountain chain with many volcanoes. Ranger Jens Oreo Demo The inset shows these plates to be the Cocos plate and the North American plate. Are transform boundaries continental or oceanic? Ancient magma chamber rocks can be exposed if subduction stops and the volcanoes erode away. A forearc basin develops in the low area between the two mountain ranges. Igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rocks are all found in abundance. The eruption of Mt. It is subducting under (that is, being forced under) the South American plate. 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. Credit: Photo Courtesy of Robert J. Lillie. Farther east the Juan de Fuca Plate descends deeper and deeper. Examples of ocean-continent convergent boundaries are subduction of the Nazca Plate under South America (which has created the Andes Range) and subduction of the Juan de Fuca Plate under North America (creating the mountains Garibaldi, Baker, St. Helens, Rainier, Hood, and Shasta, collectively known as the Cascade Range). The triangular zone of partial melting near the ridge crest is approximately 60 km thick and the proportion of magma is about 10% of the rock volume, thus producing crust that is about 6 km thick. North America plate, Australia plate, Antarctic plate, Nazca plate, Filipino plate, Cocos plate, Juan de Fuca plate. Mount Rainier National Park showcases a 14,411-foot (4,393-meter) composite volcano. An ancient volcano, Mt. At an ocean-continent convergent boundary, the oceanic plate is pushed under the continental plate in the same manner as at an ocean-ocean boundary. Novarupta Lava Dome Geology This subduction-subduction-transform (SST) triple junction is referred to hereafter as the NACC triple junction. Examples of continent-continent convergent boundaries are the collision of the India Plate with the Eurasian Plate, creating the Himalaya Mountains, and the collision of the African Plate with the Eurasian Plate, creating the series of ranges extending from the Alps in Europe to the Zagros Mountains in Iran. Katmai National Park and Preserve lies where the worlds largest volcanic event of the 20th Century occurred. Antarctic plate, Pacfic plate, Eurasia plate, India Plate, Africa plate. the East Pacific Rise has created rift valleys where the Pacific plate is separating from the North American plate, Cocos plate, . The western part of California (including Los Angeles and part of San Francisco) will split away from the rest of North America, and eventually sail right by the west coast of Vancouver Island, en route to Alaska. This plate is moving north east towards the Arabia and Eurasia plates. What plate boundary is the Philippines and Eurasian Plate? Most of the sedimentary rocks formed from layers of sand and mud deposited in the ocean. But given enough time, the Coast Ranges lift up distances we can measure, while at the same time wind, rain, and the pounding of waves wear the landscape back down. Pillow basalt layers formed more than a mile (1.6 kilometers) below the surface of the ocean are now almost a mile above sea-level on Hurricane Ridge Road in Olympic National Park, Washington. Because the oceanic crust formed by spreading on the mid-Atlantic ridge is not currently being subducted (except in the Caribbean), the Atlantic Ocean is slowly getting bigger, and the Pacific Ocean is getting smaller. Explain why the Nootka Fault is a transform fault, and show the relative sense of motion along the fault with two small arrows. Credit: Photo courtesy of Robert J. Lillie. National Park Service sites in the Coastal Ranges of Washington, Oregon and northern California contain rugged mountains of rocks that were manufactured in the ocean, then scraped off the plate and lifted out of the sea. Kenai Fjords National Park This plate is small. This plate includes India and the surrounding India Ocean. A by-product of the metamorphism is the release of hot fluids, especially water. Not surprisingly, many of the engravings depict landscapes of national parks. Some of the processes taking place in this setting include: Spreading is hypothesized to start within a continental area with up-warping or doming related to an underlying mantle plume or series of mantle plumes. Left image The part of California west of the San Andreas Fault and all of Baja California are on the Pacific Plate. Start with the major plates, and then work on the smaller ones. What are the three types of convergent plate boundaries? USGS photo. Transform faults do not just connect divergent boundaries. And at times, lower-silica components of their magma chambers erupt, producing basalt lava flows as well as cinders and volcanic bombs. Dont worry if you cant name them all. The low region between the two parallel mountain ranges is the, 150 miles inland, the top of the subducting plate reaches depths where its hot enough to generate fluids, forming volcanoes in the. When a series of mantle plumes exists beneath a large continent, the resulting rifts may align and lead to the formation of a rift valley (such as the present-day Great Rift Valley in eastern Africa). Kenai Fjords National Park Layers of sandstone and shale deposited on the top of the Pacific Plate were later metamorphosed to quartzite and slate as the plate subducted beneath southern Alaska, and then shoved upward as part of the accretionary wedge. With continued uplift and erosion, most of the volcanic material would erode. The Pacific Plate is moving to the northwest at a speed of between 7 and 11 centimeters (cm) or ~3-4 inches a year. The park is right above the focus of the Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964, one of the two largest ever recorded (the other, in 1961, occurred along the subduction zone off western South America). Mount Rainier. Question: Tectonic Plates Use this map to answer the following questions. When rifting of Pangea started at approximately 200 Ma, the fissuring was along a different line from the line of the earlier collision. Colors denote depth below sea level and elevation on land. In 1966, Tuzo Wilson proposed that there has been a continuous series of cycles of continental rifting and collision; that is, break-up of supercontinents, drifting, collision, and formation of other supercontinents. Sites in the Sierra Nevada Mountains reveal the eroded roots of an ancient volcanic range that formed when the subduction zone extended much farther south. St. Helens in 1980. Two arms of the triple junction can split to form an entire ocean. The best example is the San Andreas Fault on the Pacific coast of the United States. The magma, which is lighter than the surrounding mantle material, rises through the mantle and the overlying oceanic crust to the ocean floor where it creates a chain of volcanic islands known as an island arc. The overlying volcanoes have since eroded away, exposing a vast expanse of the ancient magma chambers in the Sierra Nevada. At present, North and South America, Europe, and Africa are moving with their respective portions of the Atlantic Ocean. A continent-continent collision occurs when a continent or large island that has been moved along with subducting oceanic crust collides with another continent (Figure \(\PageIndex{8}\)). During the same period, the Atlantic Ocean began to open up between northern Africa and North America, and India broke away from Antarctica. The North American Plate, for example, rotates counter-clockwise; the Eurasian Plate rotates clockwise. It runs along the west coast of Mexico and western Caribbean countries. Off the Pacific coast, the Cocos plate is subducted beneath both the North American and Caribbean plates, which are separated by a sinistral transcurrent boundary. Modified from Oregon's Island in the Sky: Geology Road Guide to Marys Peak, by Robert J. Lillie, Wells Creek Publishers, 75 pp., 2017, www.amazon.com/dp/1540611965. Mazama, erupted and collapsed 7,700 years ago, forming the large cavity (caldera) that now holds Crater Lake. This plate includes the northeastern part of the Atlantic ocean, all of Europe, all of Russia (except its most eastern part), and down through southeast Asia, including China and Indonesia. Much of the stable plate is under water and is called the Caribbean ocean . It is named after Cocos Island, the only emergent island on the plate. Incipient rifting has begun along the Great Rift Valley of eastern Africa, extending from Ethiopia and Djibouti on the Gulf of Aden (Red Sea) all the way south to Malawi. Hood in Oregon, Mt. Mantle flow in the RiveraCocos subduction zone | Geophysical Journal International | Oxford Academic Summary. Remove the Washington quarter and you can see what the landscape might look like, in the form of Crater Lake in Crater Lake National Park in Oregon. And as time ticks on, the region awaits sudden release of energy locked between the converging plates as a devastating earthquake. More recent studies of continental matchups and the magnetic ages of ocean-floor rocks have enabled us to reconstruct the history of the break-up of Pangea. The boundary between the Pacific and North American plates in California is a transform plate boundary marked by the San Andreas strike-slip fault. Which is true? Cocos Island rides on it.. Pillow basalts attest to the oceanic origins of the rock layers, as they formed from lava flows that cooled on the ocean floor. The Pacific plate is subducting beneath the Philippine Sea plate to the east while the west/northwestern part of the Philippine Sea plate is subducting beneath the continental Eurasian plate. In her version of the Oreo cookie demonstration, the creamy filling is the layers of sediment and basalt on the ocean floor. As a result of this collision, the oceanic Cocos plate is subducted below the Caribbean along the Mesoamerican trench plate at speeds ranging from 2 in. NPS photo. The mafic magma produced adjacent to the subduction zone rises to the base of the continental crust and leads to partial melting of the crustal rock. The LibreTexts libraries arePowered by NICE CXone Expertand are supported by the Department of Education Open Textbook Pilot Project, the UC Davis Office of the Provost, the UC Davis Library, the California State University Affordable Learning Solutions Program, and Merlot. St. Helens in 1980. The other piece became the Nazca plate.The Cocos plate also broke into two pieces, creating the small Rivera plate. Divergent boundaries are spreading boundaries, where new oceanic crust is created to fill in the space as the plates move apart. New Guinea and the northern parts of New Zealand are part of the Australia plate. Garibaldi to Lassen Peak, coincides with the north-to-south extent of the subducting plate boundary. Modified from The Geology of our National Parks, Monuments and Seashores, by Robert J. Lillie, New York, W. W. Norton and Company, 298 pp., 2005, www.amazon.com/dp/0134905172. The part of the plate around the Australia plate is moving southwards. The line of active volcanoes, from Mt. Drum (right). USGS photo. This page titled 10.4: Plate, Plate Motions, and Plate Boundary Processes is shared under a CC BY 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Steven Earle (BCCampus) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request. The series of hot spots that has been identified in the Atlantic Ocean may also have existed for several hundred million years, and thus may have contributed to rifting in roughly the same place on at least two separate occasions (Figure \(\PageIndex{13}\)). Compaction in the Rock Cycle: Understanding the Process Behind Sedimentary Rock Formation, Crystallization in the Water Cycle: A Fundamental Process in Water Distribution and Purification, Understanding Crystallization in the Rock Cycle: A Fundamental Process in Rock Formation, Extracting Lat/Lng from Shapefile using OGR2OGR/GDAL. Compared to the other tectonic plates in the region, the Cocos Plate is converging with the Caribbean Plate at a steady rate of about 78 millimeters per year based on data from ISCO over 10 months. Increased temperature and pressure at that depth cause the rocks to metamorphose and dehydrate (sweat). The North American plate is moving to the west-southwest at about 2.3 cm (~1 inch) per year driven by the spreading center that created the Atlantic Ocean, the Mid Atlantic Ridge. As they were caught in the vise between the converging Juan de Fuca and North American plates, some of the layers were so contorted that they are now in vertical orientations along the coast. Elias National Park Mount Rainier is a 14,000 foot (4,300 meter) volcano in the Cascade Range developed above the place where the subducting Juan de Fuca Plate reaches sufficient depth to release hot fluids into the overriding North American Plate. Effects of the 1964 earthquake are quite spectacular in the park; the coastline dropped so much that in places it lies submerged beneath about 8 feet (2.5meters) of water. The Cocos plate was created about 23 million years ago when a larger plate broke into two pieces. The Cascades form above the line where the subducting plate extends to depths where it heats up, dehydrates and causes magma to form. The northern boundary of the Cocos Plate is the Middle America Trench. Roughly 3.2 million square kilometers (1.2 million square miles) in area, the Caribbean. The lake partially fills a collapsed crater (caldera) that formed when a 12,000-foot (3,700-meter) composite volcano, Mt. Examples of ocean-ocean convergent zones are subduction of the Pacific Plate beneath the North America Plate south of Alaska (Aleutian Islands) and beneath the Philippine Plate west of the Philippines, subduction of the India Plate beneath the Eurasian Plate south of Indonesia, and subduction of the Atlantic Plate beneath the Caribbean Plate (see Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\)). Pangea, which existed from about 350 to 200 Ma, was not the first supercontinent. The Nazca plate is an oceanic tectonic plate in the southeastern Pacific Ocean that shares both convergent and divergent boundaries, corners multiple triple junctions, contains three seamount chains, overrides four hotspots, and is responsible for the creation of the Andean orogeny (Figure 1). Right image Wrangell (left) and Mt. This map shows the boundaries between the major plates. The types are ocean-ocean, ocean-continent, and continent-continent. This plate makes up all of Antarctica and much of the surrounding ocean. Kenai Fjords National Park lies within a coastal mountain range (accretionary wedge) formed as the Pacific Plate subducts beneath southern Alaska. To see the timing of these processes for yourself, go to time lapse of Continental Movements. The distribution and depths of earthquakes in the Caribbean and Central America area are shown in Figure 11.2.3. Once youve named most of the plates, draw arrows to show the general plate motions. Divergent boundaries are spreading boundaries, where new oceanic crust is created from magma derived from partial melting of the mantle caused by decompression as hot mantle rock from depth is moved toward the surface (Figure \(\PageIndex{3}\)). This plate includes the islands that make up the Philipines and north to include parts of southern Japan. When caught between the converging Juan de Fuca and North American plates, the pillows and other ocean layers can be lifted upward to more than a mile above sea level. The North American Plate . It is likely that as many as 20 mantle plumes, many of which still exist, were responsible for the initiation of the rifting of Pangea along what is now the mid-Atlantic ridge (see Figure \(\PageIndex{10}\)). Plates move as rigid bodies, so it may seem surprising that the North American Plate can be moving at different rates in different places. This plate is moving northwest towards the Australia, Filipino, and Eurasia plates. Plates move as rigid bodies, so it may seem surprising that the North American Plate can be moving at different rates in different places. The east coast of North America is a passive margin and not a plate boundary. More than 40 volcanoes have erupted in Alaska since Russians first arrived in the mid 1700s a great many of the volcanoes are in areas that are now National Park Service sites. Step 2/2. What type of plate boundaies are found between the Cocos, Nazca, and Pacific plates? Along these boundaries, earthquakes are common and magma (molten rock) rises from the Earths mantle to the surface, solidifying to create new oceanic crust. This plate is small. Within the past few million years, rifting has taken place in the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, and also within the Gulf of California. Mazama, violently erupted 7,700 years ago. The two parallel mountain ranges influence many of the physical and cultural aspects of the Pacific Northwest. The Cocos Plate is a relatively small sized, triangular-shaped oceanic plate located just west of Mexico and the Caribbean. Remove unwanted regions from map data QGIS. This plate is rotating in a clockwise direction towards the Pacific plate. The Cocos Ridge (CR), which formed when the Cocos Plate drifted over the Galapagos Hotspot (Walther, 2003) , is a bathymetric high reaching about 2 km above the surrounding seafloor and stretching about 2000 km long and 200-300 km wide across the Cocos Plate . Some transform faults connect continental parts of plates. In central and southern California the ancient volcanoes have largely eroded away. The water rises and melts rock in its path. This plate is moving north east towards the Caribbean and North America plates. The physical landscape was an important component of the practical and spiritual aspects of Native Americans lives. By the end of 1967 the Earths surface had been mapped into a series of plates (Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\)). Most of the igneous rocks were manufactured in the ocean and are basalt. A mature island arc develops into a chain of relatively large islands (such as Japan or Indonesia) as more and more volcanic material is extruded and sedimentary rocks accumulate around the islands. We know that the JDF Plate is moving toward the North American Plate at around 4 centimeters per year to 5 centimeters per year. Mazama 7,700 years before, the material expelled from its magma chamber did not spew forth out of the top of the volcano. Lake Clark National Park and Preserve contains an active composite volcano with a profile and recent history reminiscent of Mt. (Click on arrows and slide left and right to see labels.). Mt. The part of the plate around the South America plate is moving northwards and a little east. The spectacular pillow lavas seen on the road up Hurricane Ridge indicate that lava formed on the sea floor and was later uplifted. Mazama, Aniakchak no longer holds a large lake because the caldera wall is breached. This is why some of the mountain chains formed during the earlier collision can be traced from Europe to North America and from Europe to Africa. Some geological processes act so slowly that we may think of the Earth as rock-solid and unmoving. Rainier National Park is an active composite volcano rising more than 14,000 feet above sea level. . It separates the Pacific Plate to the west from (north to south) the North American Plate, the Rivera Plate, the Cocos Plate, the Nazca Plate, and the Antarctic Plate. Off the Pacific coast, the Cocos plate is subducted beneath both the North American and Caribbean plates, which are separated by a sinistral transcurrent boundary. Subduction zones occur when one or both of the tectonic plates are composed of oceanic crust. Near their boundary, the plates can lock together for centuries, then suddenly let go as a giant earthquake. The major plates are Eurasia, Pacific, India, Australia, North America, South America, Africa, and Antarctic. The Rocky Mountains in B.C. Likewise, individual volcanic eruptions may add only a thin layer to the surface. A sudden unlocking could produce an earthquake every bit as big as the one that occurred in Alaska in 1964, when a similar subduction zone boundary snap occurred. Credit: Photo Courtesy of Robert J. Lillie. This situation may not continue for too much longer, however. Now suppose the subduction processes that form the volcanoes were to stop, shutting off the magma supply that feeds the volcanoes. Where is a divergent plate boundary located? Rainier in Washington, Mt. 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. National Park Service sites in the Cascades reveal colorful landscapes that result from a varity of volcanic processes.