The Balmoral Reef Plate is a small

tectonic plate Plate tectonics (from the la, label=Late Latin, tectonicus, from the grc, τεκτονικός, lit=pertaining to building) is the generally accepted scientific theory that considers the Earth's lithosphere to comprise a number of large te ...

(

microplate A microplate, also known as a microtiter plate (''Microtiter'' is a registered trademark in the United States, therefore it should not be used generically without attribution), microwell plate or multiwell, is a flat plate with multiple "wells" ...

) located in the south

Pacific The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean (or, depending on definition, to Antarctica) in the south, and is bounded by the continen ...

north of

Fiji Fiji ( , ,; fj, Viti, ; Fiji Hindi: फ़िजी, ''Fijī''), officially the Republic of Fiji, is an island country in Melanesia, part of Oceania in the South Pacific Ocean. It lies about north-northeast of New Zealand. Fiji consists ...

. Clockwise from the north, it borders the

Pacific Plate The Pacific Plate is an oceanic tectonic plate that lies beneath the Pacific Ocean. At , it is the largest tectonic plate. The plate first came into existence 190 million years ago, at the triple junction between the Farallon, Phoenix, and Iza ...

, the

Australian Plate The Australian Plate is a major tectonic plate in the eastern and, largely, southern hemispheres. Originally a part of the ancient continent of Gondwana, Australia remained connected to India and Antarctica until approximately when India broke ...

, Conway Reef Plate, and the

New Hebrides Plate The New Hebrides Plate, sometimes called the Neo-Hebridean Plate, is a minor tectonic plate located in the Pacific Ocean, near the island country of Vanuatu. The plate is bounded on the southwest by the Indo-Australian Plate which is subducting ...

. The northern and western borders are a

divergent boundary In plate tectonics, a divergent boundary or divergent plate boundary (also known as a constructive boundary or an extensional boundary) is a linear feature that exists between two tectonic plates that are moving away from each other. Divergent b ...

while the rest of the borders are transform and convergent boundaries. The Balmoral Reef Plate's ocean crust is less than 12 million years old and is spreading between the

New Hebrides New Hebrides, officially the New Hebrides Condominium (french: link=no, Condominium des Nouvelles-Hébrides, "Condominium of the New Hebrides") and named after the Hebrides Scottish archipelago, was the colonial name for the island group ...

and

Tonga Tonga (, ; ), officially the Kingdom of Tonga ( to, Puleʻanga Fakatuʻi ʻo Tonga), is a Polynesian country and archipelago. The country has 171 islands – of which 45 are inhabited. Its total surface area is about , scattered over in ...

subduction. The plate forms the west central part of the seafloor of the

North Fiji Basin The North Fiji Basin (NFB) is an oceanic basin west of Fiji in the south-west Pacific Ocean. It is an actively spreading back-arc basin delimited by the Fiji islands to the east, the inactive Vitiaz Trench to the north, the Vanuatu/New Hebrides ...

. The plate's movement vectors, as accepted today, were first proposed in 2003 by Bird. Its boundaries and

angular momentum In physics, angular momentum (rarely, moment of momentum or rotational momentum) is the rotational analog of linear momentum. It is an important physical quantity because it is a conserved quantity—the total angular momentum of a closed syst ...

were further defined in 2011 and 2018 with refinement of

deformation and strain rate.. The Balmoral Reef Plate however may be less rigid, as assummed in such modelling, as it is dominated by active deformation zones. The region is complex and may well have several other microplates or blocks.. To the west its triple junction with the

and the

is quite close to the western triple junction of the Futuna Plate.

References

Sources

* * * * * * * * * Bird, P., Y. Y. Kagan, and D. D. Jackson, Plate tectonics and earthquake potential of spreading ridges and oceanic transform faults, in Plate Boundary Zones, ''Geophys. Monogr. Ser.'', vol. 30, edited by S. Stein and J. T. Freymueller, 203–218, AGU, Washington, D. C., 2002. Tectonic plates Geology of the Pacific Ocean {{tectonics-stub

See also

References

Sources