Capricorn Plate

Capricorn Plate

Introduction

Published in Ranadhir Mukhopadhyay, Victor J. Loveson, Sridhar D. Iyer, P.K. Sudarsan, Blue Economy of the Indian Ocean, 2020

Ranadhir Mukhopadhyay, Victor J. Loveson, Sridhar D. Iyer, P.K. Sudarsan

The Southeast Indian Ridge, on the other hand, separates the Indo-Australian Plate from the Antarctic Plate. The Indo-Australian Plate, in fact, comprises three plates: Indian Plate, Capricorn Plate, and Australian Plate. All these three meet to form a diffuse plate boundary south of Sri Lanka. The enormous African Plate has been divided since 20 Ma by the East African Rift into the Nubian and Somali Plates (Chatterjee et al., 2013).

Scientific ocean drilling in the Australasian region: a review

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Journal Information

Published in Australian Journal of Earth Sciences, 2022

N. F. Exon, R. J. Arculus

At ca 80 Ma, a ridge jump from west to east of Madagascar occurred, with spreading developed between Madagascar and India. By the same time, spreading had commenced and propagated eastwards between Australia and Antarctica, continuing as the present-day Southeast Indian Ridge, linking with the Pacific–Antarctic Ridge at ca 35 Ma. At ca 43 Ma, spreading between Australia and India ceased, possibly coincident with the hard docking of India with Asia. Australia, Antarctica and India had temporarily become part of the same plate again, but at 35 Ma, the former two separated, and beginning at ca 20 Ma a new plate boundary developed between Australia and India, forming the intervening Capricorn Plate (Royer & Gordon, 1997). The fragmentation of Eastern Gondwana was mostly complete by this time.

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Introduction

Scientific ocean drilling in the Australasian region: a review