Tectonic Boundaries and Their Role In Australia

Tectonic boundaries are the outer edges of a tectonic plate. These boundaries are hot spots for natural disaster inducing activity. There are three types of boundaries which primarily give rise to certain geological events. The boundary in effect for the Australian plate in relation to the Sunda plate is a convergent boundary. A convergent boundary is when two parts of the lithosphere are colliding into one another . When this occurs it pushes the lithosphere down and under its counterpart which in returns pushes the opposite part of land mass up. Large convergent collisions can create massive mountainous formations along with the rise of volcanoes.

 The Australian plate is subducting under the Sunda plate which is why there is an immense amount  volcanic activity in Indonesia due to it sitting on top of the boundary. Thankfully Australia is approximately 500 miles away from the Sunda plate and about 300 miles to the closes point of the Pacific plate boundary. This means that the mainland of Australia is quite in the sense of seismic and volcanic activity. There is not a single active volcano within the mainland of Australia. However earthquakes occur about once a day but most read under a 2.0 on the richter scale. Luckily Australia is far enough from its boundaries and its not presently at risk for devastating earthquakes or volcano eruptions unlike its unfortunate neighbor Indonesia.

SOURCES: Article, Article 2

Comments

  1. Ana GGFebruary 3, 2018 at 1:47 PM

    So, is interesting that a country like yours, in the middle of a plate, will have indeed earthquakes...I'm looking forward to hearing what you discover next week about this.

    ReplyDelete

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