Sentences with phrase «subduction zone plate»

The GPS network detected the slow slip events occurring on the Hikurangi subduction zone plate boundary in the weeks and months following the Kaik?ura earthquake.

Not exact matches

SASMEX's main focus is on earthquakes originating in the subduction zone off the southern coast of Mexico, where the Cocos tectonic plate subducts below the North American Pplate subducts below the North American PlatePlate.

They simulated earthquakes with magnitudes between 9.0 and 9.6 originating at different locations along the Aleutian - Alaska subduction zone, a 3,400 - kilometer (2,113 - mile) long ocean trench stretching along the southern coast of Alaska and the Aleutian Islands where the Pacific tectonic plate is slipping under the North American plate.

Three basic forces are believed to drive oceanic plate movement: plates are «pushed» away from mid-ocean ridges as new sea floor forms; plates are «pulled» as the oldest parts of the plate dive back into the earth at subduction zones; and convection within the asthenosphere helps ferry the plates along.

The pressure difference could be caused by hot, partially molten rock piled up beneath mid-ocean ridges or beneath the cooling plates diving into the earth at subduction zones, the authors write.

One hint of weak coupling at a subduction zone is the presence of serpentinite — a mineral formed when seawater carried down by a descending plate reacts with mantle rock.

Many of the islands sit above a subduction zone, where two plates meet and one slides haltingly under the other, down into the Earth's mantle.

«Measuring the strength of olivine is critical to understanding how strong tectonic plates are, which, in turn, matters to how plates break and create subduction zones like those along the Cascadia plate, which runs down the west coast of Canada to the west coast of the United States,» said Warren, a geologist in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment.

On the Pacific Coast, this area sits along the subduction zone known as the Cascadia plate, which runs down the west coast of Canada to the west coast of the United States.

The Earth's lithosphere is divided into several plates that are in constant motion, and today's geologists have a good understanding of what drives these plate movements: heavier ocean plates are submerged beneath lighter continental plates along what are known as subduction zones.

Events of this magnitude normally occur in a subduction zone, where one tectonic plate slides beneath another.

But just as in the past, earth scientists still do not understand what triggered plate tectonics in the first place, nor how the first subduction zone was formed.

The island nation sits atop an active subduction zone where the Pacific Plate slips below the Australian Plate.

Most earthquakes are said to occur at subduction zones or along faults in tectonic plates.

The ocean plate is descending below North America at the Cascadia subduction zone, which runs from northern Vancouver Island, British Columbia, to Northern California.

The Tohoku - Oki earthquake occurred in a «subduction zone,» a boundary between two tectonic plates where one plate is diving beneath another — in this case, the Pacific plate dives beneath the Eurasian plate just east of Japan.

The billion - year time lag between the earliest, «proto - subduction» and the full onset of plate tectonics can be explained by the slow, painstaking development of weak zones within the plates, he proposes.

The strain that is released in a subduction zone earthquake is thought to build up in the deep portion of the fault where the two plates are «locked.»

«Orogenic oceanic - continental subduction zones have been common as long as modern plate tectonics have been active,» Delph said.

In these regions of «flat - slab» subduction, the Nazca plate moves horizontally for several hundred kilometers before continuing its descent into the mantle, and is shadowed by an extended zone of crustal seismicity in the overlying South America plate.

Instead, the new finding adds evidence that gravity pulling the plates into subduction zones may drag them across the globe.

The map shows that, so far, almost all of the aftershocks have occurred along the subduction zone that lies on the boundary of the Pacific plate.

The Sea of Okhotsk earthquake may have involved re-rupture of a fault in the plate produced when the oceanic plate bent down into the Kuril - Kamchatka subduction zone as it began to sink.

With these plate tectonic reconstructions Schellart was able to predict where the fossil subduction zone was during its lifetime some 50 - 70 million years ago, and therefore where the lithospheric slab disappeared into the mantle.

This regularity could shed light on the workings of tectonic plate boundaries called subduction zones, and it might even turn out to herald a season of heightened risk for larger quakes.

At subduction zones such as these, an oceanic tectonic plate sinks (subducts) into the Earth's interior, the mantle.

The deep mantle - derived buoyancy, together with plate cooling at the surface, creates negative buoyancy that together explain the observations along the East Pacific Rise and surrounding Pacific subduction zones.

(A subduction zone is where one tectonic plate sinks below another.)

Ward modeled the effects of a magnitude 9.2 earthquake in the Cascadia subduction zone — a 58,000 - square - mile region in the Pacific from British Columbia to Northern California where the Juan de Fuca plate sinks beneath the North American plate.

The broader region is vulnerable to earthquakes from multiple sources, including deep earthquakes within the subducted Juan de Fuca plate, offshore megathrust earthquakes on Cascadia subduction zone and the shallow crustal earthquakes within the North American Pplate, offshore megathrust earthquakes on Cascadia subduction zone and the shallow crustal earthquakes within the North American PlatePlate.

The team will focus on the Sunda subduction zone, where the Indo - Australian plate goes beneath the Sunda plate.

At certain subduction zones, such as those in Cascadia, Sumatra and eastern Alaska, a thick sediment layer overlies the subducting oceanic plate.

The project «offers a unique opportunity to image the seismic structures associated with an entire plate, including its spreading center and subduction zone, within an easily accessible part of the continental and offshore United States,» said University of Massachusetts Amherst researcher Haiying Gao, a guest editor of the SRL focus section.

Subduction zones are areas where one tectonic plate dives or «subducts» beneath another plate.

Scientists have long thought diamonds could form in subduction zones, where one tectonic plate plunges under another and sinks hundreds of kilometers into the mantle.

The Sea of Okhotsk rests above a subduction zone, a place where one of the Earth's tectonic plates slides beneath another.

Both events occurred along a subduction zone, an area where a tectonic plate dives or «subducts» beneath an adjacent tectonic plate.

The Arabian and Eurasian tectonic plates collide offshore of Pakistan, forming a subduction zone, but today's earthquake was onshore and mostly strike - slip — each side of the fault moved horizontally.

From the time interval (56 years), the known speed of the Nazca plate, and further knowledge of the subduction zone, the German - Chilean team has calculated the accumulated energy and thus the theoretical slip of the 2016 earthquake to about 3.4 meters.

The earthquake occurred along a 500 - kilometre segment of the Peru - Chile subduction zone, where part of the Nazca Plate in the Pacific Ocean plunges beneath the South American Plate.

A plate can bump up against another plate at a fault zone, or dive beneath one at a subduction zone.

The volcanoes are formed by conditions at the subduction zone where one of Earth's largest tectonic plates, the Pacific Plate, dives beneath the Australian Plate.

The subduction zone along the western edge of South America, where the Nazca plate slides eastward beneath the South American plate at an average rate of about 6.5 centimeters per year, can indeed generate massive quakes.

«We are interested in large - scale geophysical processes, like how plate tectonics initiates and how plates move underneath one another in subduction zones,» said David Goldsby, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

In a subduction zone, a heavy oceanic plate meets a second, lighter continental plate and moves under it and into the earth's mantle.

In high - pressure and high - temperature X-ray measurements that were partly conducted at DESY, scientists created conditions similar to those in so - called subduction zones where an oceanic plate dives under the continental crust.

Because it lies just slightly west of the Cascadia subduction zone, the young seafloor is easily shoveled east beneath the North American Plate.

Such a fracture, says Duarte, is evidence of an «embryonic subduction zone,» where a new edge is formed, then forced under the remainder of the plate, into the Earth's molten mantle.

For example, waves move slower when passing through hot magma, such as mantle plumes and hotspots, than they do when passing through colder subduction zones, locations where one tectonic plate slides beneath another.

The study, published February 12 in Nature Geoscience, focused on the Costa Rica subduction zone where the Cocos plate slowly dives beneath the overriding Caribbean plate.