- define tectonic plates in this zone
- Banda Sea Plate (Wikipedia)
The Banda Sea Plate is a minor tectonic plate underlying the Banda Sea in southeast Asia. This plate also carries a portion of Sulawesi Island, the entire Seram Island, and the Banda Islands. Clockwise from the east it is bounded by the Bird’s Head Plate of western New Guinea, Australian Plate, Timor Plate, Sunda Plate, and the Molucca Sea Collision Zone. The western border is a convergent boundary 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. 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 which measured around 8.4 on the moment magnitude scale.
- Bird’s Head Plate (Wikipedia)
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 and Müller consider it to be moving in unison with the Pacific Plate. P. Bird considers it to be unconnected to the Pacific Plate.
- Sunda Plate (Wikipedia)
The Sunda Plate is a minor tectonic plate straddling the Equator in the Eastern Hemisphere on which the majority of Southeast Asia is located.
- 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.
