The Bird's Head Plate is a minor tectonic plate incorporating the Bird's Head Peninsula at the western end of the island of New Guinea. Hillis & Müller consider it to be moving in unison with the Pacific Plate. Bird considers it to be unconnected to the Pacific Plate.
The plate is separating from the Australian Plate and the small Maoke Plate along a divergent boundary to the southeast. Convergent boundaries exist along the north between the Bird's Head and the Caroline Plate, the Philippine Sea Plate, and the Halmahera Plate to the northwest. A transform boundary exists between the Bird's Head and the Molucca Sea Collision Zone to the southwest. Another convergent boundary exists between the Bird's Head and the Banda Sea Plate to the south.
Famous quotes containing the words bird, head and/or plate:
“his head
May not lie on the breast nor his lips on the hair
Of the woman that he loves, until he dies.
O beast of the wilderness, bird of the air,
Must I endure your amorous cries?”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Piece by piece I seem
to re-enter the world: I first began
a small, fixed dot, still see
that old myself, a dark-blue thumbtack
pushed into the scene,
a hard little head protruding
from the pointillist’s buzz and bloom.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Our press is certainly bankrupt in the “thrill of awe”Motherwise reverence: reverence for nickel plate and brummagem. Let us sincerely hope that this fact will remain a fact forever; for to my mind a discriminating irreverence is the creator and protector of human liberty.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)