Bird's Head Plate

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:

    The bird would cease and be as other birds
    But that he knows in singing not to sing.
    The question that he frames in all but words
    Is what to make of a diminished thing.
    Robert Frost (1874–1963)

    In the fell clutch of circumstance,
    I have not winced nor cried aloud:
    Under the bludgeonings of chance
    My head is bloody, but unbowed.
    —W.E. (William Ernest)

    I sometimes have the sense that I live my life as a writer with my nose pressed against the wide, shiny plate glass window of the “mainstream” culture. The world seems full of straight, large-circulation, slick periodicals which wouldn’t think of reviewing my book and bookstores which will never order it.
    Jan Clausen (b. 1943)