Once youve named most of the plates, draw arrows to show the general plate motions. St. Helens in 1980. 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. The Cascades form above the line where the subducting plate extends to depths where it heats up, dehydrates and causes magma to form. It formed millions of years ago when the Farallon Plate split into the Cocos Plate and the Nazca Plate.. The Caribbean-North America-Cocos Triple Junction and the dynamics of St. Helens, a lava dome later grew within the breached crater near the mountains summit. Modified from Earth: Portrait of a Planet", by S. Marshak, 2001, W. W. Norton & Comp., New York. Magma from the mantle pushing up to fill the voids left by divergence of the two plates, Magma cooling more slowly in the lower part of the new crust and forming gabbro bodies, Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Plates tect2 en by the. Mazama that formed Crater Lake. The North American Plate is one of the slowest, averaging around 1 cm/y in the south up to almost 4 cm/y in the north. Increased temperature and pressure at that depth cause the rocks to metamorphose and dehydrate (sweat). Modified from "Beauty and the Beast: Plate Tectonics and the Landscapes of the Pacific Northwest", by Robert J. Lillie, Wells Creek Publishers, 92 pp., www.amazon.com/dp.1512211893. Transform faults are not limited to oceanic crust and spreading centers; many of them are on continental margins. Hood in Oregon, Mt. Produced under a Cooperative Agreement for earth science education between the National Park Service's Geologic Resources Division and the American Geosciences Institute. Often it is the older and colder plate that is denser and subducts beneath the younger and hotter plate. The Caribbean Plate is a mostly oceanic tectonic plate underlying Central America and the Caribbean Sea off the north coast of South America. Is the Cocos Plate convergent or divergent? - Study.com Plate of Cocos: Location and General Characteristics In her version of the Oreo cookie demonstration, the creamy filling is the layers of sediment and basalt on the ocean floor. Finally, using a highlighter or colored pencil, label as many of the boundaries as you can as divergent, convergent, or transform. This can be demonstrated by stacking the three quarters with California on the bottom, overlain by Oregon and then Washington. It is bordered by the Caribbean, North American, Pacific, and Nazca tectonic plates. Left image The 6-mile (10-kilometer) wide caldera is about 2,000 feet (600 meters) deep. 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. Farther inland, the subducting plate reaches depths where it sweats hot water. Two parallel mountain ranges have been forming as a result of the Juan de Fuca Plate subducting beneath the edge of North America. The roots of ancient mountain belts, which are present along the eastern margin of North America, the western margin of Europe, and the northwestern margin of Africa, show that these land masses once collided with each other to form a mountain chain, possibly as big as the Himalayas. USGS photo. Transform boundaries exist where one plate slides past another without production or destruction of crustal material. Novarupta Lava Dome The inset shows these plates to be the Cocos plate and the North American plate. The Cascade Volcanoes extend in a north-south line from Mt. All volcanic eruptions in Iceland, such as the 1973 eruption of Eldfell, the 1783 eruption of Laki, and the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajkull, are caused by the North American and the Eurasian Plates moving apart, which is a result of divergent plate boundary forces. Cocos Plate; Type: Minor: Approximate area: 2,900,000 km 2: Movement 1: north-east: Speed 1: 67 mm/year: . the East Pacific Rise has created rift valleys where the Pacific plate is separating from the North American plate, Cocos plate, . After a terrifying free-fall that lasted 8 minutes, the pilots finally managed to restart the engines at only 6,000 feet (2,000 meters). The original composite volcano was about 7,000 feet (2,000 meters) high, but lost about 2,500 feet (750 meters) of its height. Garibaldi to Lassen Peak, coincides with the north-to-south extent of the subducting plate boundary. At an ocean-ocean convergent boundary, one of the plates (oceanic crust and lithospheric mantle) is pushed, or subducted, under the other. Cocos Island rides on it.. Other rocks seen in the high mountains at the center of the park were pushed more deeply into the Earth, where increasing temperature and pressure changed them into metamorphic rocks known as quartzite and slate. The most famous example of a transform boundary is the San Andreas Fault in California. Plate Tectonics and Our National ParksSite Index, Plate TectonicsThe Unifying Theory of Geology, Tectonic Settings of NPS SitesMaster List, ORCAOregon Caves National Monument, Oregon [, SEKIKings Canyon National Park, California[, YOSEYosemite National Park, California[. Fortunately, no one was injured. 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. If two tectonic plates collide, they form a convergent plate boundary. But if the lava spills out from beneath the ocean, it encounters cold water and hardens quickly as a pile of pillows. Later, most of the settlers coming on the Oregon Trail continued past central Oregon and Washington to the lush farmland of the Willamette Valley and Puget Sound, the low-lying region between the two rising mountain ranges. Regional tectonics of Central America are mainly controlled by the collision of the Cocos and the Caribbean plates. 100% (1 rating) SOLUTION: * The plate boundaries moving towards each other are called the convergent plate boundaries. Ranger Jens Oreo Demo Parks in the Cascadia Subduction Zone dramatically display the two distinct mountain ranges the Coast Range just above where the Juan de Fuca Plate begins to subduct, and the volcanic Cascade Range farther inland, where the top of the plate is deeper. It includes the central Caribbean countries and runs along the northern edge of South America. Thus subduction-zone volcanoesincluding those in the Cascadescan be explosive (think of the release of steam in a boiling pot of thick oatmeal). Modified from Parks and Plates: 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. That the Atlantic Ocean rift may have occurred in approximately the same place during two separate events several hundred million years apart is probably no coincidence. The eruption of Aniakchak Volcano about 3,500 years ago rivals the eruption and collapse of Mt. And at times, lower-silica components of their magma chambers erupt, producing basalt lava flows as well as cinders and volcanic bombs. Is the Nazca plate convergent or divergent? The Sierra Nevada are the eroded remnants of the volcanic arc developed when the Farallon Plate subducted beneath the continent. The volcano is still active, having erupted in 1931. Plate Tectonics | Pacific Northwest Seismic Network Are transform boundaries continental or oceanic? This is what has happened in the Sierra Nevada of central and southern California, as represented by the granite-type rocks of Half Dome within Yosemite National Park shown on the California state quarter. Plate tectonics is the theory that the crust of the earth is broken up into giant slabs of rocks that sort of fit together like puzzle pieces. Beginning about 30 million years ago, so much of the Farallon Plate was consumed by subduction that the Pacific and North American plates were in contact, forming the San Andreas transform plate boundary in western California. The line of active volcanoes, from Mt. The initial magma formed as mantle rock melts beneath a subduction zone has low silica (basalt) composition. Dont worry if you cant name them all. Imagine if Mt. New Guinea and the northern parts of New Zealand are part of the Australia plate. Crater Lake National Park has the 9th deepest lake in the world. The three West Coast states are especially meaningful because they have geologic features that, when the quarters are stacked, represent the surface and subsurface of the chain of volcanoes that has been developing over the past 200 million years. Without referring to the plate map in Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\), or any other resources, write in the names of as many of the plates as you can. The Cocos Plate Examine the interactive globe. The North American Plate is one of the slowest, averaging around 1 cm/y in the south up to almost 4 cm/y in the north. 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. Crater Lake partially fills the caldera of a volcano that erupted and collapsed in on Itself 7,700 years ago. Once this happens, the continents will no longer continue to move apart because the spreading at the mid-Atlantic ridge will be taken up by subduction. The part of the plate around the Australia plate is moving southwards. Many National Park Service sites are found in active and ancient subduction zones. North America plate, South America plate, Cocos plate. National Park Service sites are shown in red. The Philippine Sea plate is tectonically unusual in that almost all the boundaries are convergent. Bold numbers are the years of moderately large (larger than about M7) historical earthquakes written next to their approximate location. To the north it borders the North American Plate, which encompasses the entire north of the continent. 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. But thousands of eruptions over less than a million years have built Mount Rainier and other Cascade peaks to elevations of more than 10,000 feet (3,000 meters)! Cocos and Rivera Plates - Americas:Tectonics - Weebly South America plate, Pacific plate, Antarctic plate, Cocos plate. The eruption of Mt. 20 Million Years Ago Remove unwanted regions from map data QGIS. Photo courtesy of Robert J. Lillie. At present, North and South America, Europe, and Africa are moving with their respective portions of the Atlantic Ocean. This plate is bound by the North-American and Caribbean Plates to the north-east, the small Rivera Plate to the north-west, the Pacific Plate to the west, and the Nazca Plate to the south (Fig 1). What type of plate boundary is the Cocos Plate? - Our Planet Today This map shows the boundaries between the major plates. Redwood National and State Parks, California Mazama 7,700 years before, the material expelled from its magma chamber did not spew forth out of the top of the volcano. Sediment that has accumulated on the continental slope is thrust up into an accretionary wedge, and compression leads to thrusting within the continental plate (Figure \(\PageIndex{7}\)). It was preceded by Pannotia (600 to 540 Ma), by Rodinia (1,100 to 750 Ma), and by others before that. 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. South America plate, Antarctic plate, Eurasia plate, North America plate, Arabia plate, India plate, Australia plate. Yosemite Valley and Half Dome. Credit: Photo Courtesy of Robert J. Lillie. The Nazca plate is a large tectonic plate that underlies the Pacific Ocean near the western coast of South America. These quarters featured iconic images that have special meaning to each state. Mantle flow in the RiveraCocos subduction zone | Geophysical Journal International | Oxford Academic Summary. The Caribbean Plate is a mostly oceanic tectonic plate underlying Central America and the Caribbean Sea off the northern coast of South America . 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. 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. St. Helens. The resulting magma ascends through the crust, producing a mountain chain with many volcanoes. (Note that spreading rates are typically double the velocities of the two plates moving away from a ridge.). Juan De Fuca Plate - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics Based on Keary and Vine, 1996, Global Tectonics (2ed), Blackwell Science Ltd., Oxford. Cocos Plate - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics 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. EESA06 Module 4 Flashcards | Quizlet Poking through the mass of some of the highest mountains in North America are very young volcanoes formed by the ongoing Pacific Plate subduction. The spectacular pillow lavas seen on the road up Hurricane Ridge indicate that lava formed on the sea floor and was later uplifted. Sandstone and shale layers at Kenai Fjords are commonly metamorphosed and were so deformed during subduction and uplift that they are vertical in places. Mazama, erupted and collapsed 7,700 years ago, forming the large cavity (caldera) that now holds Crater Lake. 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. This plate is moving north east towards the Caribbean and North America plates. Convergent boundaries , where two plates are moving toward each other, are of three types, depending on the type of crust present on either side of the boundary oceanic or continental . An ancient volcano, Mt. Identifying port numbers for ArcGIS Online Basemap? KEFJKenai Fjords National Park, Alaska[Geodiversity Atlas] [Park Home], CRLACrater Lake National Park, Oregon[Geodiversity Atlas] [Park Home], LAVOLassen Volcanic National Park, California[Geodiversity Atlas] [Park Home], MORAMount Rainier National Park, Washington[Geodiversity Atlas] [Park Home], ANIAAniakchak National Monument and Preserve, Alaska[Geodiversity Atlas] [Park Home], KATMKatmai National Park, Alaska[Geodiversity Atlas] [Park Home], LACLLake Clark National Park, Alaska[Geodiversity Atlas] [Park Home]. When the plates suddenly let go, a massive earthquake will shake the entire Pacific Northwest, a series of tsunami waves will pound the Coast, and landslides will make it difficult to reach some of those in need. Pillow lavas form on the ocean floor where erupting magma encounters cold sea water. Explain why the Nootka Fault is a transform fault, and show the relative sense of motion along the fault with two small arrows. Is the Cocos Plate convergent or divergent? A glance at a map of the western United States might suggest that the Sierra Nevada are a southward continuation of the Cascade Volcanoes. The Caribbean plate is sandwiched between the North American and South American plates to the east and the Cocos, Nazca and North Andean plates to the west. Sea lions resting on layers of pillow basalt that formed beneath the ocean and were uplifted as part of the accretionary wedge. This plate includes all of North America, Greenland, the eastern most part of Russia, northern Japan, and the northwestern part of the Atlantic ocean. Subduction of the Farallon Plate beneath the entire West Coast created a line of volcanoes from Alaska to Central America. Olympic National Park, Washington o The boundary is found far from the North American Plate in the Pacific Ocean The boundary appears to be situated on a mid-ocean ridge ( ) The boundary is found close to the North American Plate. 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 collapse caldera from the Katmai eruption is about 3 miles (5 kilometers) across and 2,000 feet (600 meters) deep. 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. Today Mazama, violently erupted 7,700 years ago. Observations. USGS photo. The volcanoes are forming above the region where the top of the subducting Juan de Fuca Plate reaches about 50 miles (80 kilometers) depth. The plates are made up of crust and the lithospheric part of the mantle (Figure \(\PageIndex{2}\)), and even though they are moving all the time, and in different directions, there is never a significant amount of space between them. What type of plate boundary is between the Nazca and Cocos Plate? Mt. 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. This plate is moving north north east towards the Eurasia plate. Farther east the Juan de Fuca Plate descends deeper and deeper. The Rocky Mountains in B.C. This plate makes up all of Antarctica and much of the surrounding ocean. Convergent Plate BoundariesSubduction Zones - National Park Service (Click on arrows and slide left and right to see labels.). The devastating 1985 Mexico City earthquake and the 2017 Chiapas earthquake were results of the subduction of the Cocos Plate beneath the North American Plate. Four-letter codes indicate the ancient volcanic arc parks listed near the top of this page. When rifting of Pangea started at approximately 200 Ma, the fissuring was along a different line from the line of the earlier collision. Looking first at Washington, one sees Mt. Illustrations above modified from Beauty from the Beast: Plate Tectonics and the Landscapes of the Pacific Northwest, by Robert J. Lillie, Wells Creek Publishers, 92 pp., 2015, www.amazon.com/dp/1512211893. The part of California west of the San Andreas Fault and all of Baja California are on the Pacific Plate. CC BY. Convergent boundaries, where two plates are moving toward each other, are of three types, depending on whether oceanic or continental crust is present on either side of the boundary. 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. Granite rocks found in national parks in the Sierra Nevada are the cooled and eroded remnants of magma chambers that fed ancient subduction zone volcanoes in California.