Banda Sea Plate
Encyclopedia
Banda Sea
The Banda Sea is a sea in the Maluku Islands of Indonesia, technically part of the Pacific Ocean but separated from it by hundreds of islands, as well as the Halmahera and Ceram Seas...
in southeast Asia
Asia
Asia is the world's largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres. It covers 8.7% of the Earth's total surface area and with approximately 3.879 billion people, it hosts 60% of the world's current human population...
. This plate also carries a portion of Sulawesi Island, the entire Seram Island, and the Banda Islands
Banda Islands
The Banda Islands are a volcanic group of ten small volcanic islands in the Banda Sea, about south of Seram Island and about east of Java, and are part of the Indonesian province of Maluku. The main town and administrative centre is Bandanaira, located on the island of the same name. They rise...
. Clockwise from the east it is bounded by the Bird's Head Plate
Bird's Head Plate
The Bird's Head Plate is a minor tectonic plate incorporating the Bird's Head Peninsula at the western end of the island of New Guinea. Hillis & Müller consider it to be moving in unison with the Pacific Plate. Bird considers it to be unconnected to the Pacific Plate. The plate is separating from...
of western New Guinea
New Guinea
New Guinea is the world's second largest island, after Greenland, covering a land area of 786,000 km2. Located in the southwest Pacific Ocean, it lies geographically to the east of the Malay Archipelago, with which it is sometimes included as part of a greater Indo-Australian Archipelago...
, Australian Plate, Timor Plate
Timor Plate
The Timor Plate is a microplate in southeast Asia carrying the island of Timor and surrounding islands. The Australian Plate is subducting under the southern edge of the plate, while a small divergent boundary is located on the eastern edge. Another convergent boundary exists with the Banda Sea...
, Sunda Plate
Sunda Plate
The Sunda Plate is the tectonic plate on which the majority of Southeast Asia is located. It was formerly considered a part of the Eurasian Plate, but GPS measurements have confirmed its independent movement at 10 mm/yr eastward relative to Eurasia...
, and the Molucca Sea Collision Zone
Molucca Sea Collision Zone
The Molucca Sea Collision Zone is postulated by paleogeologists to explain the tectonics of the area based on the Molucca Sea in Indonesia, and adjacent involved areas.-Tectonics:...
. The western border is a convergent boundary
Convergent boundary
In plate tectonics, a convergent boundary, also known as a destructive plate boundary , is an actively deforming region where two tectonic plates or fragments of lithosphere move toward one another and collide...
largely responsible for the mountains in western Sulawesi, subduction zones also exist on the eastern border near Seram and the southern border with the Timor Plate
Timor Plate
The Timor Plate is a microplate in southeast Asia carrying the island of Timor and surrounding islands. The Australian Plate is subducting under the southern edge of the plate, while a small divergent boundary is located on the eastern edge. Another convergent boundary exists with the Banda Sea...
. A small rift is located in the middle of Sulawesi. It is a very seismically active area home to many volcanoes and the site of many large earthquakes, the largest of which was the 1938 Banda Sea earthquake
1938 Banda Sea earthquake
The 1938 Banda Sea earthquake occurred in the Banda Sea region on February 1, 1938, and was the ninth largest earthquake in the 20th century. It had an estimated magnitude of 8.5 on the Moment magnitude scale, and intensities as high as VII . It generated Tsunamis of up to 1.5 metres, but no human...
which measured around 8.5 on the Richter scale.