Plate data: Bird (2003), PB2002, converted by Hugo Ahlenius, Nordpil (ODC-By 1.0). Land: Natural Earth (India POV).
The Amur Plate covers northeast China, eastern Mongolia, the Korean Peninsula and part of southeastern Russia, and on this map it also takes in western Japan.1 Savostin and others proposed the Amur plate in 1982 and 1983 for the parts of eastern Mongolia, north China and southeastern Russia that lie southeast of the Lake Baikal extensional province (Bird 2003).
Its northwestern edge runs through the Baikal Rift, where the plate pulls away from Eurasia. Bird cites GPS results by Calais and others (1998) that show extension around the Baikal Rift at 4.5 mm per year, give or take 1.2 mm. That is why most of its boundary with the Eurasian Plate is divergent on this map.2
In the east, the boundary Savostin proposed follows the active fold-and-thrust belt in the eastern Japan Sea off northern Honshu, cuts across central Honshu, and continues as the Nankai Trough, a subduction zone where it meets the Philippine Sea Plate. Miyazaki and others (1996) combined GPS data from Japan and Korea with earthquake data from Baikal and the Stanovoy Mountains, and confirmed that the plate moves at several millimeters per year relative to Eurasia. Bird computes the motion of the plate from the most recent geodetic study he cites, Heki and others (1999), which used 15 GPS stations.
USGS notes that Japan has more than 75 active volcanoes, and describes the magnitude 7.2 earthquake that struck Kobe on 16 January 1995. In PB2002, Kobe and Unzen Volcano on Kyushu both lie on the Amur Plate.1 Unzen's eruption in 1792 killed more than 15,000 people, the worst volcanic disaster in Japan's history.
Amur Plate in numbers
Measured from its PB2002 outline, the Amur Plate covers about 5.3 million km², or 1% of the
Earth's surface. That makes it number 13 by area of the 52 plates in the model.
It spans from 31°N to 57°N and from 104°E to 143°E.
Its edge is about 10,625 km long, mostly divergent:
41.4%divergentDivergent boundary. Plates pull away from each other and new crust forms between them. Source (4,403 km)
, 34.9%convergentConvergent boundary. Plates move toward each other and crust is destroyed as one plate dives under another. Source (3,706 km)
and 23.7%transformTransform boundary. Plates slide horizontally past each other. Crust is neither made nor destroyed. Source (2,516 km)
.
Countries whose main landmass sits on this plate: China, Japan, Mongolia, North Korea, Russia and South Korea. Countries that straddle a boundary
are listed under the plate that holds the center of their largest landmass.
Along its boundaries it moves a mean 1.2 cm/yr relative to its neighbors, fastest against the Philippine Sea Plate. Bird (2003)
Neighboring plates Neighbors. Plates that share a boundary with this plate. Most plate movement happens along these narrow zones between plates. Source
The Amur Plate shares a boundary with 5 plates in PB2002, longest shared edge first.
The longest, about 6,587 km, is with the Eurasian Plate; the shortest, about 383 km, is with the Okinawa Plate.
