South American Plate

  The South American plate, shown in purple

The South American Plate (Dutch: Zuid-Amerikaanse Plaat, French: Plaque Sud-américaine, Portuguese: Placa Sul-Americana, Spanish: Placa Sudamericana) is a tectonic plate which includes the continent of South America and also a sizeable region of the Atlantic Ocean seabed extending eastward to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

The easterly side is a divergent boundary with the African Plate forming the southern part of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The southerly side is a complex boundary with the Antarctic Plate and the Scotia Plate. The westerly side is a convergent boundary with the subducting Nazca Plate. The northerly side is a boundary with the Caribbean Plate and the oceanic crust of the North American Plate. At the Chile Triple Junction in Taitato-Tres Montes Peninsula, an oceanic ridge — the Chile Rise — is subducting under the South American plate.

The South American Plate is in motion, moving westward away from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The eastward-moving and more dense Nazca Plate is subducting under the western edge of the South American Plate along the Pacific coast of the continent at a rate of 77 mm per year.^[1] This collision of plates is responsible for lifting the massive Andes Mountains and causing the volcanoes which are strewn throughout them.

References

Tectonic plates Major African Australian Antarctic Eurasian Indian North American Pacific South American Minor Arabian Caribbean Cocos Juan de Fuca Nazca Philippine Scotia Other Adriatic Aegean Sea Altiplano Amurian Anatolian Balmoral Reef Banda Sea Bird's Head Burma Capricorn Caroline Conway Reef Easter Explorer Falklands Futuna Galapagos Gonâve Gorda Greenland Halmahera Iberian Iranian Juan Fernández Kerguelen Kermadec Kula Madagascar Manus Maoke Mariana Molucca Sea New Hebrides Niuafo'ou North Andes North Bismarck North Galapagos Nubian Okhotsk Okinawa Panama Pelso Philippine Mobile Belt Rivera Sangihe Seychelles Shetland Solomon Sea Somali South Bismarck South Sandwich Sri Lanka Sunda Timor Tisza Tonga Woodlark Yangtze Historical Baltic Bellingshausen Charcot Cimmerian Farallon Indo-Australian Insular Intermontane Izanagi Lhasa Moa Phoenix List of tectonic plates