cocos plate

The Cocos Plate is an oceanic tectonic plate beneath the Pacific Ocean off the west coast of Central America. The Cocos Plate is created by sea floor spreading along the East Pacific Rise, specifically in a complicated area geologists call the Cocos-Nazca spreading system. From the rise the plate is pushed eastward and pushed or dragged (perhaps both) under the less dense overriding Caribbean Plate in the process called subduction. The subducted leading edge heats up and adds its water to the mantle above it. In the mantle layer called the asthenosphere, mantle rock melts to make magma. As a result, to the northeast of the subducting edge is the continuous arc of volcanos stretching from Costa Rica to Guatemala and a belt of earthquakes that extends farther north, into Mexico. The northeastern and eastern sides are convergent boundaries subducting under the North American Plate, the Caribbean Plate, and the South American Plate. The Cocos Plate is bounded by divergent boundaries to the south with the Nazca Plate and to the west with the Pacific Plate. The Cocos and Nazca Plates are the remnants of the former Farallon Plate, which broke up about 23 million years ago. The boundary between the plates is marked by a hotspot under the Galapagos Islands

External links

the volcanic arc
Martin Meschede and Udo Barckhausen, "Plate tectonic evolution of the Cocos-Nazca plate": reconstructing its geological evolution

<< Previous

Word Browser

Next >>

classlessness
dinosaur comics
foil (literature)
frank de winne
frederick leonard
mcgonagall
arial unicode ms
ralph bellamy
sri sri
william hushka
indian institute of technology, guwahati

purple dead nettle
trading places
uss teruzuki (dd 960)
vranov
uss akizuki (dd 961)
hms charity (r29)
eric carlson
dolce & gabbana
new south wales rugby league
trs dos
thomas dudley

green mountains (vermont)
richthofen
registered retirement savings plan
napolon chagnon
hippolyte bayard
john shade
american family association
philippine plate
university of alaska system
list of asteroids
goldstone

retaining wall
african plate
joe satrom
martin caidin
koopa
world club challenge
aventura mall
brighton, australia
video game crash of 1977
bud olson
st. bonaventure university