The giant tectonic plate in the Indian Ocean between Australia and India is breaking apart, researchers have recently discovered. The India-Australia-Capricorn tectonic plate is said to be splitting apart by 0.06 inch or 1.7 millimetre a year.
According to the findings by academics from the Institute of Earth Physics of Paris which was published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the northern Indian Ocean has been widely recognised as an area of broadly distributed deformation within the composite India‐Australia‐Capricorn plate, hosting several diffuse boundary zones and a diffuse triple junction.
“It’s not a structure that is moving fast, but it’s still significant compared to other planet boundaries,” Aurélie Coudurier-Curveur, study’s co-researcher, said in a statement, according to Live Science. The academics studied the origins of the earthquakes that occurred in 2012 — the magnitude 8.6 and 8.2 earthquakes originated underwater near Indonesia which left 10 dead and several others injured.
In 2012, two extraordinary earthquakes with magnitudes greater than 8, typical of plate boundary events, occurred in the Wharton Basin, inside the India‐Australia‐Capricorn plate, slicing the seafloor along straight, old fracture zones bearing evidence of active tectonic deformation.
“Using submarine relief and seismic data, we study the freshest fracture zone (F6a) to examine whether it might qualify as a nascent plate boundary between India and Australia. We find that localised cracks along it and narrow rectangular basins (pull‐aparts) resemble those along large continental strike‐slip boundary faults, supporting the inference that the composite Indo‐Australian plate is breaking apart,” the researchers noted in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
In fact, the tectonic plate is breaking apart so slowly underwater that researchers almost missed what was happening.
