Philippine Plate

The Philippine Plate is a tectonic plate beneath the Pacific Ocean to the east of the Philippines. The Philippine plate comprises oceanic lithosphere that lies beneath the Philippine Sea, and so is often referred to as the Philippine Sea Plate because most of the Philippines lie west of this plate. The plate is bounded by the Philippine Trench to the southwest, Taiwan and the Ryukyu islands to the northwest, Japan to the north, the Izu-Ogasawara (Bonin) and Mariana islands to the east, and Yap, Palau, and easternmost Indonesia (Halmahera} to the south. The eastern part of the plate is occupied by the Izu-Bonin-Mariana Arc system.

The easterly side of the Philippine Sea Plate is a convergent boundary with the subducting Pacific Plate. The Philippine Plate is bounded on the west by the Eurasian Plate, on the south partly by the Caroline Plate, on the north by the North American Plate and possibly by the Amurian Plate.

Collision of the Philippine Plate and the Eurasian Plate formed Taiwan and continues today. In the northernmost part of the plate, thickened crust of the Izu-Bonin-Mariana arc is colliding with Japan to form the Izu Collision Zone.

The Philippine Plate forms the floor of this sea and it is one of the 5 minor lithospheric plates, about the size of the Arabian plate (Anderson, 2002). It is unique among all of the plates that now exist on Earth because it is completely surrounded by subduction zones. The Philippine Sea Plate is divided into a western “trapped” and inactive half and an eastern part that formed and continues to grow as a result of westward subduction of the Pacific Plate. The western half is doomed to disappear someday because it is being subducted to the west and north under the Eurasian Plate. This eastern half is composed of several N-S ridges (from W to E: Kyushu-Palau Ridge (KPR), Parece Vela-Shikoku West Marian Ridge (WMR large backarc basins (Fig. 1). The Izu-Ogasawara (Bonin) and Mariana islands and submarine volcanoes is sometimes referred to as the IBM (Izu-Bonin-Mariana) arc system.

The Izu Peninsula is the northernmost tip of the Philippine Plate. The Philippine Plate, the Eurasian Plate (or the Amurian Plate), and the North American or Okhotsk Plate meet at Mount Fuji.

Mount Pinatubo eruption - 15th June 1941After the days before of smaller eruptions on the 15th of June 1941 the mountain exploded. Ash was sent 100,000 feet in to the air and Pyroclastic flows were forming in all directions. No lava exited the volcano in this eruption, for it was such a forceful one that ash clouds came instead.

Mount Pinatubo is in the Philippines.

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