New Tectonic Microplate “Malpelo Plate” Off the Coast of Ecuador (Important) (Download PDF)

Rice University’s researcher have found new tectonic mircoplate off Ecuador’s coast in the eastern Pacific Ocean and named it Malpelo plate, after a Colombian island and an oceanic ridge it contains.

Key Facts

• Malpelo microplate is located west of the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador wedged in-between the Nazca, Cocos, and Caribbean minor plates and linked to a nearby oceanic ridge along the Ring of Fire.

• Most of the region east of the known Panama transform fault thought to be part of the Nazca plate was recently found to be a different tectonic plate moving independently in a different direction – the Malpelo plate.

• Malpelo plate was identified with the help of a diffuse plate boundary running from the Panama Transform Fault eastward where it intersects deep oceanic trench just offshore of Ecuador and Colombia.

• It is the 57^th tectonic microplate discovered so far and the first in nearly a decade.

Tectonic Plates

• Plate tectonics believes that Earth’s outer shell is divided into several plates that glide over the mantle, the rocky inner layer above the core.

• Plates form the strong outer layer- lithosphere.

• Plate tectonics was developed from the 1950s through the 1970s- a modern version of continental drift, theory proposed by Alfred Wegener in 1912.

• Plate tectonics are driven by convection in the mantle.

• A tectonic plate is part-crust, part-mantle pushed around by the convicting currents of superheated mantle.

Types of Plates

• 8 major tectonic plates with an area greater than 20 million km²

• 10 minor tectonic plates with area between 1 and 20 million km²

• Microplates are tectonic plates with an area less than 1 million km²

What Are Microplates, Terranes, and Zones?

• Microplates are tiny tectonic plates

• Terranes are fragments of crustal material formed on one tectonic plate and accreted to crust lying on another plate

• Zones are bands of similar rocks on a plate formed by terrane accretion or native rock formation.