The Earth’s rigid outer shell is broken into 52 plates, and every one of them is moving. Click anywhere on the map below to see which plate is under that point, which way the ground is heading and how fast, and what is happening at the nearest boundary — which plate is diving under which, and at how many millimetres a year. Every number on this page was computed from the primary scientific models rather than copied, including which plates each of the world’s 196 countries sits on.
Interactive map of the tectonic plates
Orange lines are where plates meet head-on, blue where they pull apart, green where they slide past each other. The small triangles along subduction zones point at the plate that rides over the top. Switch on the motion arrows and choose a plate to hold still — Eurasian, say — to watch the rest of the world move relative to it.
Loading the interactive map…
BoundariesSubduction (teeth on the overriding plate)CollisionSpreading ridgeContinental riftTransform faultColour = how the plates move (orange together, blue apart, green past each other) · dashed = through continental crust
Orogen — deforming zone where the rigid-plate model breaks down
Plate motion · length ∝ speed (NNR-MORVEL56)
The 52 plates and 5,819 classified boundary segments of Bird’s PB2002 model, with motions from NNR-MORVEL56, 14,356 USGS earthquakes of magnitude 6 or more (1900–2025) and 1,214 Smithsonian Holocene volcanoes. Clicking the map sends nothing anywhere; base-map tiles come from NASA GIBS or OpenStreetMap, and the live layer from the USGS.
52platesIn the PB2002 model7 major, 13 minor, 32 micro
81%Covered by the 7 major platesthe Pacific alone is 21%
260,483kmOf plate boundary51,309 km of it subduction zones
43.9mm/yrAverage plate speedabout as fast as fingernails grow
All 52 tectonic plates
Sorted by area. Speeds are the range across each plate in the no-net-rotation frame — the frame in which the Earth’s outer shell as a whole does not turn — with the plate-wide average underneath. The bar shows what each plate’s edges are made of. Click a column to sort, or a plate’s name to find it on the map.
convergentdivergenttransform· “Countries” counts land of at least 0.05% of a country or 50 km² · earthquakes 1900–2025, by epicentre
Major, minor and micro
There is no official cut-off. We call a plate major above 20 million km², which gives the conventional seven; minor from 1 to 20 million km², which gives the 13 that textbooks usually list next — Somali, Nazca, Indian, Sunda, Philippine Sea, Amur, Arabian, Okhotsk, Caribbean, Cocos, Yangtze, Scotia and Caroline; and microplates below that. Several microplates are debated: the Amur, Okhotsk and Yangtze plates move so slowly relative to their neighbours that some models fold them back into Eurasia and North America.
The major plates, and the minor ones that matter
104.6 million km² · 26–72 mm/yr towards the west-northwest
The largest plate by far — 20.5% of the planet — and almost entirely ocean floor, with its oldest crust, about 180 million years old, in the far western Pacific. It is consumed on nearly every side: for 13,744 km of its edge it is the plate that sinks, at the Aleutian, Kuril, Japan, Izu–Bonin, Mariana, Tonga and Kermadec trenches. The pull of those sinking slabs is why it is one of the fastest large plates. Its land is the edge of California and Baja California, Hawaii, and the eastern South Island of New Zealand.
55.4 million km² · 8–23 mm/yr towards the west
North America, Greenland, the western North Atlantic out to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, western Iceland — and, across the Bering Strait, the far north-east of Russia, 10.3% of that country. It overrides the plates that dive beneath it along 7,177 km of subduction zone, from the Aleutians to Cascadia and the Middle America Trench, and slides past the Pacific Plate along the San Andreas.
48.6 million km² · 17–25 mm/yr towards the east-northeast
Europe and most of Asia, carrying 69 countries — more than any other plate. It is the slow, crumpled one: almost none of its edge is subducting, and 36% of its area lies inside zones of active deformation, the Alpine–Himalayan belt that runs from Spain to Myanmar where Africa, Arabia and India are all pushing into it.
58.5 million km² · 15–33 mm/yr towards the northeast
Also called the Nubian Plate: all of Africa except the east, which is tearing away along the East African Rift as the Somali Plate. Ridges and rifts make up most of its edges — the Mid-Atlantic and Southwest Indian ridges, the Red Sea, the rift — so it is growing on most sides while it closes slowly on Europe across the Mediterranean, where the last of the ocean floor between them is sinking beneath Italy and Greece. 54 countries sit on it.
58.2 million km² · 0.2–27 mm/yr
Antarctica and a wide apron of Southern Ocean floor, ringed almost entirely by spreading ridges and their transform faults — 90% of its edge. It is the slowest major plate in places because it rotates about a point inside itself: near 65°S, 62°E in East Antarctica the ground moves 0.2 mm a year.
46.0 million km² · 37–70 mm/yr towards the north-northeast
One of the fastest-moving continents: Australia is heading north-northeast fast enough that the country had to update its national coordinate system in 2020, after it had drifted about 1.8 m since the old one was fixed in 1994. Its northern edge sinks beneath Indonesia along the Sunda Trench. The old “Indo-Australian Plate” is now split: India, Australia and, in NNR-MORVEL56, a Capricorn Plate between them move as separate plates across a wide zone of deforming ocean floor.
41.8 million km² · 7–12 mm/yr towards the north-northwest
The slowest of the majors in the no-net-rotation frame, averaging 10.6 mm/yr — yet the Andes are built at its western edge, where it overrides the Nazca Plate along 5,028 km of trench. The South Atlantic still widens by about 33 mm a year because Africa is moving too.
12.4 million km² · 50–61 mm/yr towards the northeast
India met Asia around 50 million years ago and has not stopped: the two still converge at about 45 mm/yr across the Himalaya. Roughly half of that is taken up in the mountains themselves; the rest is spread across Tibet and Central Asia. Of the plates that carry a continent, only the Australian moves faster.
16.1 million km² · 52–77 mm/yr towards the east
Born at the East Pacific Rise and swallowed beneath South America 74 mm a year off central Chile. Its subduction made the 1960 Valdivia earthquake, M9.5, the largest ever recorded. Easter Island and the Galápagos both sit on it, despite the small Easter and Galápagos microplates named after them.
2.9 million km² · 44–96 mm/yr towards the northeast
The fastest-moving plate over a million km², averaging 74.6 mm/yr. It sinks beneath Mexico and Central America along the Middle America Trench, feeding the volcanic chain from Guatemala to Costa Rica — with Cocos Island, Costa Rica’s, the only land it carries.
5.4 million km² · 23–75 mm/yr
Trapped between trenches: it dives under Japan at the Nankai Trough and under Taiwan and the Ryukyus, while on its eastern side the Pacific Plate dives under it. The Challenger Deep, at about 10,935 m the deepest point in the ocean, lies at that eastern edge. Its collision with China’s Yangtze Plate in Taiwan is, at 88 mm/yr, the fastest collision zone in the model.
4.9 million km² · 35–56 mm/yr towards the northeast
Torn from Africa along the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, which open at about 13 mm/yr, and driven north into Iran, where the collision has raised the Zagros. Its western edge is the Dead Sea Transform, which runs through Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.
3.0 million km² · 10–21 mm/yr towards the northeast
Moving east relative to the Americas, with transform faults along its northern and southern sides and the Lesser Antilles arc at its leading edge, where Atlantic floor sinks beneath it. The fault system through Hispaniola on its northern edge produced the 2010 Haiti earthquake. 20 countries have land on it.
256,348 km² · 8–28 mm/yr
A remnant of the vast Farallon Plate that once lay under the eastern Pacific. It is sinking beneath Oregon, Washington and British Columbia at about 34 mm/yr along the Cascadia subduction zone, which last broke in a magnitude-9 earthquake on 26 January 1700 — dated by the tsunami it sent to Japan.
575,606 km² · 0–26 mm/yr
Most of Turkey, squeezed westward out of the way of Arabia. It slips past Eurasia along the North Anatolian Fault at about 24 mm/yr — the fault of the 1999 İzmit earthquake — and past Arabia along the East Anatolian Fault, which broke in the M7.8 earthquake of February 2023.
Which tectonic plate is each country on?
Every country’s land, intersected with every plate: 73 of 196 countries sit on more than one. Shares are of land area, measured on Natural Earth 1:10m outlines; overseas regions that are part of a state (the Canaries, Réunion, Hawaii) count, separate territories (Greenland, Puerto Rico) do not.
How fast the ground under some well-known cities is moving, and how far it is to the nearest plate boundary. Tap one to open it on the map.
Los Angeles is on the Pacific Plate and San Francisco on the North American, so the two are closing on each other: across the San Andreas system the plates slide past at about 51 mm/yr. Only about two-thirds of that is taken up by the San Andreas itself — the rest is spread over faults offshore and east of the Sierra Nevada.
How plates meet: the three kinds of boundary
Bird’s model breaks the 260,483 km of plate boundary into 5,819 short steps and classifies each one by how the plates move across it. Rates below are recomputed for every step from NNR-MORVEL56; they agree with Bird’s own to within 1.5 mm/yr on the median step.
Convergent
91,759 km · 35% of all boundaries
Subduction zones (51,309 km) are where one plate bends down into the mantle under another, leaving a deep-sea trench and, a hundred or two kilometres behind it, a line of volcanoes. They close at 62 mm/yr on average, faster than any other kind of boundary, and they produce the largest earthquakes on Earth. Where two continents meet, neither will sink: the crust thickens into collision zones like the Himalaya and Alps (23,003 km).
Divergent
94,806 km · 36% of all boundaries
Mid-ocean ridges (67,335 km) are where new ocean floor is made: the plates pull apart, the mantle beneath rises and partly melts, and fresh crust fills the gap. They run from 11 mm/yr on the Arctic Gakkel Ridge to 146 mm/yr on the East Pacific Rise at 31°S. On land the same process starts as a continental rift (27,471 km) — East Africa, Lake Baikal — that may one day become an ocean, as the Red Sea is now.
Transform
73,918 km · 28% of all boundaries
Here plates slide past each other sideways, neither making nor destroying crust. Most are short oceanic transform faults (47,785 km) that offset the ridges in zigzags; the famous continental ones (26,133 km) are the San Andreas, the North Anatolian, New Zealand’s Alpine Fault and the Dead Sea Transform. They lock, store strain and break in large, shallow earthquakes.
How fast famous boundaries move
Relative plate motion at a representative point on each, from NNR-MORVEL56. It is the full rate between the two plates — part of it can be spread over several faults.
Boundary
What is happening
Rate
Map
Tonga Trench (north)
Pacific Plate subducting beneath the Tonga Plate
243 mm/yr24.3 cm a year
East Pacific Rise
Pacific and Nazca plates spreading apart
146 mm/yr14.6 cm a year
Japan Trench
Pacific Plate subducting beneath northern Japan
93 mm/yr9.3 cm a year
Peru–Chile Trench
Nazca Plate subducting beneath South America
74 mm/yr7.4 cm a year
Middle America Trench
Cocos Plate subducting beneath Central America
73 mm/yr7.3 cm a year
Aleutian Trench
Pacific Plate subducting beneath North America
73 mm/yr7.3 cm a year
Mariana Trench
Pacific Plate subducting beneath the Mariana Plate
69 mm/yr6.9 cm a year
Sunda Trench
Australian Plate subducting beneath Sumatra
58 mm/yr5.8 cm a year
San Andreas Fault zone
Pacific and North American plates sliding past
51 mm/yr5.1 cm a year
Himalaya
India colliding with Eurasia
45 mm/yr4.5 cm a year
Alpine Fault, New Zealand
Pacific and Australian plates sliding and colliding
40 mm/yr4.0 cm a year
Hellenic Trench
Africa subducting beneath the Aegean
38 mm/yr3.8 cm a year
Cascadia
Juan de Fuca Plate subducting beneath North America
34 mm/yr3.4 cm a year
Mid-Atlantic Ridge (South Atlantic)
South America and Africa spreading apart
33 mm/yr3.3 cm a year
North Anatolian Fault
Anatolia sliding west past Eurasia
24 mm/yr2.4 cm a year
Iceland (Mid-Atlantic Ridge)
North America and Eurasia spreading apart
19 mm/yr1.9 cm a year
Southwest Indian Ridge
Africa and Antarctica spreading apart
15 mm/yr1.5 cm a year
Red Sea
Arabia pulling away from Africa
13 mm/yr1.3 cm a year
Gakkel Ridge (Arctic)
North America and Eurasia spreading apart
11 mm/yr1.1 cm a year
Dead Sea Transform
Arabia sliding north past Africa (Sinai)
7 mm/yr0.7 cm a year
East African Rift (equator)
Somali Plate pulling away from Africa
5 mm/yr0.5 cm a year
How fast do tectonic plates move?
Averaged over the entire surface of the Earth, the plates move at 43.9 mm a year — almost exactly the rate a fingernail grows. That is about 44 km every million years: at that pace the 6,000 km width of the Atlantic takes some 140 million years, which is roughly when the South Atlantic began to open.
A plate’s speed only means something once you say what it is moving relative to. The relative motion between two plates is an honest measurement — GPS stations on either side of the San Andreas really do approach each other at 51 mm/yr. A single plate’s “absolute” speed depends on the frame of reference. The figures on this page use the no-net-rotation frame, in which the plates’ motions add up to zero rotation of the shell as a whole; in a frame fixed to the deep mantle hotspots the Pacific moves faster still. The map’s “motion relative to” menu lets you switch frames and see for yourself how much of a plate’s apparent speed is a matter of viewpoint.
Plates with sinking edges move fasterThe 20 plates over a million km², sized by area. Correlation r = 0.77. Forsyth and Uyeda found the same in 1975 and concluded that the main force driving plates is slab pull — the weight of cold, dense ocean floor sinking into the mantle drags the rest of the plate behind it. India is the outlier: fast, with little sinking edge in this model because its northern edge is a continental collision rather than a trench — explanations range from old slab still attached beneath Asia to the push of mantle flow from below.
Most still point on any plateEast Antarctica · 0.2 mm/yr
Earthquakes and volcanoes trace the plate boundaries
Since 1973, when the global seismic network became complete for large earthquakes, the USGS has recorded 7,327 of magnitude 6 or more. 92.6% were on a plate boundary; counting Bird’s deforming zones, where the plates are not rigid, 98.3%. Only 1.7% struck inside a plate.
Where M6+ earthquakes happen, 1973–2025
Subduction zones71.1% · 5,208
Oceanic transform faults9.8% · 718
Deforming zones (orogens)5.7% · 415
Continental collision3.0% · 223
Spreading ridges2.9% · 215
Continental transform faults2.4% · 173
Continental rifts1.7% · 126
Inside plates1.7% · 125
Oceanic convergent1.7% · 124
A subduction zone is credited with any earthquake on its overriding side within 250 km of the trench, or further for deep ones, which happen inside the sinking slab; others go to the nearest boundary within 200 km. Of the 651 earthquakes deeper than 300 km, every one was in a subducting slab — the deepest, M6.1, 688 km below Fiji.
The 20 largest earthquakes since 1900, and the boundaries that made them
Nazca Plate subducting beneath the Altiplano PlateSubduction zone
60 mm/yr
18 of the 20 struck on a subduction interface. The exceptions are the 1950 Assam–Tibet earthquake, in the India–Eurasia collision zone, and the 2012 Wharton Basin earthquake, which ruptured the ocean floor of the incoming Indian Plate west of Sumatra — the largest strike-slip earthquake ever recorded.
The big earthquakes far from any boundary
M7.7 · 197517 km SSW of Leilani Estates, Hawaii · 3,711 km from a boundary
M7.7 · 200117 km NW of Bhachau, India · 394 km from a boundary
M7.4 · 1933Baffin Bay · 1,975 km from a boundary
M7.2 · 1929256 km S of Saint-Pierre, Saint Pierre and Miquelon · 1,775 km from a boundary
M7.2 · 191913 km ENE of Trevelin, Argentina · 342 km from a boundary
M7.1 · 2001south of Australia · 662 km from a boundary
M7.1 · 2015southeast Indian Ridge · 540 km from a boundary
Intraplate earthquakes are rare but not harmless: the 2001 Bhuj earthquake in Gujarat, nearly 400 km from the nearest plate boundary, killed about 20,000 people. Plates are stressed from their edges, and old faults deep inside them can fail.
Volcanoes
Subduction zones838 · 69%
Rift zones and ridges221 · 18%
Intraplate (hotspots)149 · 12%
Of the 1,214 volcanoes the Smithsonian lists as active in the last 11,700 years, by its own classification of their setting. Subduction volcanoes form where water released by the sinking slab lowers the melting point of the mantle above it. The intraplate ones sit over hotspots: Hawaii is 3,727 km from the nearest plate boundary, and the Pacific Plate is carrying it west-northwest at 69 mm/yr, off the plume that built it.
What most tectonic plate maps get wrong
“There are seven tectonic plates.”
There are seven major plates, covering 81.0% of the surface. Current models recognise 50 to 56 in total; PB2002 has 52, and the 32 microplates among them are where some of the fastest and most violent tectonics on Earth happens.
“The Indo-Australian Plate.”
India and Australia have moved as separate plates for millions of years, turning slowly against each other across a broad zone of the central Indian Ocean where the ocean floor between them is buckling and faulting. The 2012 Wharton Basin earthquake, M8.6, broke in that zone. Every modern model splits them.
“The Pacific Plate moves at 10 cm a year.”
A plate has no single speed, because it rotates. In the no-net-rotation frame the Pacific moves 26 mm/yr near its rotation axis and 72 mm/yr 90° away from it. Click two points on the map to see the difference.
“The Tonga Plate subducts beneath the Australian Plate.”
The other way round, and with a different partner: the Pacific Plate dives beneath the Tonga Plate, at up to 22.9 cm a year — the fastest plate convergence anywhere. The Tonga Plate itself overrides it. The same mistake is often made for the Kermadec, New Hebrides and Mariana plates, all of which ride on top.
“Easter Island is on the Easter Microplate.”
Easter Island is 332 km east of it, on the Nazca Plate. Likewise the Galápagos Islands are on the Nazca Plate, not the Galápagos microplate, which lies about 1,000 km to the west at the junction of the Pacific, Nazca and Cocos plates.
“Mexico is on the North American Plate.”
92.7% of it is. The Baja California peninsula — 7.3% of Mexico — rides the Pacific Plate, pulling away from the mainland as the Gulf of California opens.
“Hawaii is on a plate boundary.”
It is about as far from one as it is possible to be: 3,727 km, in the middle of the Pacific Plate. Its volcanoes are fed by a hotspot, and the chain of islands and seamounts that stretches north-west from it is the track of the plate moving over that hotspot.
Frequently asked questions
How many tectonic plates are there?
It depends on the model, because the smallest plates are a matter of definition. The standard global model, Peter Bird's PB2002, has 52 plates; NNR-MORVEL56, the model most often used for plate speeds, has 56; the geodetic GSRM v2.1 has 50. All of them agree on the seven major plates, which between them cover 81.0% of the Earth's surface. Below that, 13 minor plates are over a million km² each, and the remaining 32 are microplates.
What are the seven major tectonic plates?
By area: the Pacific (104.6 million km²), African (58.5 million km²), Antarctic (58.2 million km²), North American (55.4 million km²), Eurasian (48.6 million km²), Australian (46.0 million km²), South American (41.8 million km²). Older lists name an "Indo-Australian Plate" instead of the Australian; India and Australia are now known to move independently, which is why every current model separates them.
What is the largest tectonic plate?
The Pacific Plate, at 104.6 million km² — 20.5% of the planet's surface, larger than the North American and Eurasian plates put together. It is almost all ocean floor; the only sizeable land it carries is coastal California and Baja California, Hawaii, and the eastern South Island of New Zealand.
What is the smallest tectonic plate?
In PB2002 it is the Manus microplate in the Bismarck Sea north of Papua New Guinea: about 8,219 km², a little smaller than Cyprus. It is also one of the fastest-spinning plates on Earth, at 51.6° per million years.
How fast do tectonic plates move?
Averaged over the whole surface of the Earth, the plates move at 43.9 mm a year — about as fast as a fingernail grows. The slowest major plate, the South American, averages 10.6 mm/yr; the fastest large ones, the Cocos and Nazca plates, 74.6 and 70 mm/yr. The record holder is the small Tonga Plate at 121.8 mm/yr on average; where the Pacific Plate dives beneath it the two meet at over 22.9 cm a year, the fastest plate convergence on Earth.
Why does a plate not have a single speed?
Because plates rotate. A rigid cap on a sphere can only move by turning about an axis through the Earth's centre, so ground near that axis barely moves while ground 90° away moves fastest. Across the Pacific Plate the speed varies from 26 to 72 mm/yr. The Antarctic Plate actually contains its own rotation pole, in East Antarctica at about 65°S 62°E, where the ground moves 0.2 mm/yr.
Which tectonic plate is the United States on?
The North American Plate carries 98.9% of the country. The other 1.1% — coastal California west of the San Andreas Fault, including Los Angeles, San Diego and Big Sur, and the whole of Hawaii — is on the Pacific Plate. San Francisco sits just east of the fault, on the North American side.
Which tectonic plate is the United Kingdom on?
The Eurasian Plate, all of it. The nearest plate boundary is about 1,600 km from London. The UK still has earthquakes, but they are small intraplate events; the country is carried along at about 22 mm/yr towards the northeast.
Is Iceland on two tectonic plates?
Yes. Iceland sits on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge where the North American and Eurasian plates pull apart at about 18.7 mm/yr. On the PB2002 boundary line, 56.2% of the island is on the North American Plate and 43.8% on the Eurasian. In reality the boundary is a belt of rift zones up to about 50 km wide; the most famous place to see it is the Þingvellir rift valley, and divers can swim between the two sides in the Silfra fissure.
Which tectonic plates is Japan on?
Usually four are named — the Okhotsk (or North American), Amur (or Eurasian), Philippine Sea and Pacific plates. PB2002 puts Japanese land on six: Okhotsk (54.1%), Amur (42.1%), Okinawa (3.3%, southern Kyushu and the Ryukyus), Philippine Sea (the Izu Peninsula and islands), and two specks: Minami-Torishima on the Pacific Plate and the disputed Senkaku Islands on the Yangtze Plate.
Which country is on the most tectonic plates?
Indonesia, on 11 plates in PB2002 — from the Sunda Plate under Java, Sumatra and Borneo to the Bird's Head, Maoke and Banda Sea microplates in the east. 73 of the 196 countries in our directory sit on more than one plate.
Which type of plate boundary causes the most earthquakes?
Subduction zones. Of the 7,327 magnitude 6+ earthquakes recorded since 1973, 71.1% happened at subduction zones, and 18 of the 20 largest since 1900 struck on the interface where one plate dives under another — including the M9.5 Chile earthquake of 1960, the largest ever recorded. Every one of the 651 earthquakes deeper than 300 km happened inside a sinking slab.
Is Mount Everest on the Indian or the Eurasian Plate?
On the map, the Eurasian: the summit stands about 111 km north of where PB2002 draws the India–Eurasia boundary, along the foot of the Himalaya. Geologically it is more interesting than either answer. The Himalaya are a pile of crust scraped off the front of India as it pushes beneath Tibet, and the summit itself is marine limestone, full of the fossils of sea creatures, laid down on the floor of an ancient sea some 470 million years ago.
What is the Ring of Fire?
The horseshoe of subduction zones that surrounds the Pacific, from New Zealand through Tonga, Indonesia, Japan, Kamchatka and Alaska down to the Andes. The Pacific Plate alone dives beneath its neighbours along 13,744 km of trench, and the Nazca, Cocos, Philippine Sea and Juan de Fuca plates add more. Most of the world's subduction volcanoes and nearly all of its largest earthquakes are on this ring.
Sources and method
Plates and boundaries: PB2002, Bird, P. (2003), “An updated digital model of plate boundaries”, Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems 4(3), 1027, doi:10.1029/2001GC000252, in the GIS edition by Hugo Ahlenius (Nordpil), Open Data Commons Attribution licence. Its 52 plate outlines, 13 orogens and 5,819 classified boundary steps are used unaltered. Subduction polarity — which plate goes under — is Bird’s, from the boundary titles.
Plate motion: NNR-MORVEL56, Argus, D. F., Gordon, R. G. and DeMets, C. (2011), “Geologically current motion of 56 plates relative to the no-net-rotation reference frame”, G³ 12, Q11001,doi:10.1029/2011GC003751. The angular velocities are copied from its Table 1 and the velocity at each point is computed as ω × r. Four MORVEL plates — Capricorn, Macquarie, Lwandle and Sur — lie inside PB2002 plates; points inside them, located with DeMets’ published outlines, use their own poles. Recomputed relative velocities agree with Bird’s own at the median boundary step to 1.5 mm/yr, and the plate areas we measure match those printed in Argus et al. to the last decimal place they give, for every plate the two models share.
Countries: Natural Earth 1:10m country outlines (public domain), intersected with each plate polygon; areas are computed on the sphere. Very small islands are drawn larger than life at this scale, so the tiniest shares — under 0.01% — are best read as “this island is on that plate”. Plate boundaries on land are often a zone tens of kilometres wide drawn as a line, so shares near a boundary are a statement about the model, not a survey.
Earthquakes: USGS ANSS Comprehensive Earthquake Catalog (public domain), every event of magnitude 6 or more from 1 January 1900 to 31 December 2025 classed as an earthquake (14,356 events). Before about 1973 the catalogue is incomplete for M6–7, so percentages use 1973–2025. The live layer reads the USGS past-30-days feed directly from your browser. Volcanoes: Smithsonian Institution Global Volcanism Program, Volcanoes of the World (v. 5.3), Holocene list, with the GVP’s own tectonic-setting classification. Relief: NASA Blue Marble shaded relief and bathymetry via GIBS.
Data generated 2026-10-11. Regenerate with npm run gen:tectonics.
Afghanistan
Albania
Algeria
Andorra
Angola
Antigua and Barbuda
Argentina
Armenia
Australia
Austria
Azerbaijan
Bahamas
Bahrain
Bangladesh
Barbados
Belarus
Belgium
Belize
Benin
Bhutan
Bolivia
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Botswana
Brazil
Brunei
Bulgaria
Burkina Faso
Burundi
Cambodia
Cameroon
Canada
Cape Verde
Central African Republic
Chad
Chile
China
Colombia
Comoros
Costa Rica
Croatia
Cuba
Cyprus
Czech Republic
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Denmark
Djibouti
Dominica
Dominican Republic
Ecuador
Egypt
El Salvador
Equatorial Guinea
Eritrea
Estonia
Eswatini
Ethiopia
Fiji
Finland
France
Gabon
Gambia
Georgia
Germany
Ghana
Greece
Grenada
Guatemala
Guinea
Guinea-Bissau
Guyana
Haiti
Honduras
Hungary
Iceland
India
Indonesia
Iran
Iraq
Ireland
Israel
Italy
Ivory Coast
Jamaica
Japan
Jordan
Kazakhstan
Kenya
Kiribati
Kuwait
Kyrgyzstan
Laos
Latvia
Lebanon
Lesotho
Liberia
Libya
Liechtenstein
Lithuania
Luxembourg
Madagascar
Malawi
Malaysia
Maldives
Mali
Malta
Marshall Islands
Mauritania
Mauritius
Mexico
Micronesia
Moldova
Monaco
Mongolia
Montenegro
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Mozambique
Myanmar
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Nauru
Nepal
Netherlands
New Zealand
Nicaragua
Niger
Nigeria
North Korea
North Macedonia
Norway
Oman
Pakistan
Palau
Palestine
Panama
Papua New Guinea
Paraguay
Peru
Philippines
Poland
Portugal
Qatar
Republic of the Congo
Romania
Russia
Rwanda
Saint Kitts and Nevis
Saint Lucia
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Samoa
San Marino
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Saudi Arabia
Senegal
Serbia
Seychelles
Sierra Leone
Singapore
Slovakia
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Solomon Islands
Somalia
South Africa
South Korea
South Sudan
Spain
Sri Lanka
Sudan
Suriname
Sweden
Switzerland
Syria
Taiwan
Tajikistan
Tanzania
Thailand
Timor-Leste
Togo
Tonga
Trinidad and Tobago
Tunisia
Turkey
Turkmenistan
Tuvalu
Uganda
Ukraine
United Arab Emirates
United Kingdom
United States
Uruguay
Uzbekistan
Vanuatu
Vatican City
Venezuela
Vietnam
Yemen
Zambia
Zimbabwe