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:
“I never saw a wild thing
Sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead
From a bough
Without ever having felt sorry for itself.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“The head must bow, and the back will have to bend,
Wherever the darkey may go;
A few more days, and the trouble all will end,
In the field where the sugar-canes grow.
A few more days for to tote the weary load,
No matter, t will never be light;
A few more days till we totter on the road:
Then my old Kentucky home, good-night!”
—Stephen Collins Foster (18261884)
“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 wouldnt think of reviewing my book and bookstores which will never order it.”
—Jan Clausen (b. 1943)