Web Desk(August 16, 2017): A team of researchers have discovered a new tectonic plate off the coast of Ecuador. There were 56 plates; now, there are 57 — and researchers think there could be one more to find.
Scientists discovered the microplate — which they’ve dubbed “Malpelo” — while analyzing the movements of what they believed to be the convergence of a trio of plates.
Researchers were studying the coming together of a major tectonic plate and two smaller plates. The edges of the Pacific lithospheric plate roughly form the Ring of Fire, a region of volcanic activity.
The intersect plates don’t collide head on. Nor do they slip over and under one another, such as the case at a subduction zone. The plates rotate around each other, like a series of gears.
By measuring the rates of seafloor spreading and the angles at which the plates slip by each other, researchers can estimate the speeds at which plates spin.
“When you add up the angular velocities of these three plates, they ought to sum to zero,” Rice geophysicist Richard Gordon said. “In this case, the velocity doesn’t sum to zero at all. It sums to 15 millimeters a year, which is huge.”
“A diffuse boundary is best described as a series of many small, hard-to-spot faults rather than a ridge or transform fault that sharply defines the boundary of two plates,” Gordon said. ”
“The nonclosure around this triple junction goes down — not to zero, but only to 10 or 11 millimeters a year,” researcher Tuo Zhang said. “Since we’re trying to understand global deformation, we need to understand where the rest of that velocity is going. So we think there’s another plate we’re missing.”
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