Galápagos microplate

The Galápagos microplate (GMP) is a geological feature of the oceanic crust located at 1°50' N, offshore of the west coast of Colombia.

At that time, the southern boundary of the microplate was then starting to form by an active hotspot located beneath the East Pacific Rise.

[5][4] The tip of the Cocos-Nazca ridge has maintained a distance of 50 km from the East Pacific Rise and slightly moved its position into the eastern part of the microplate due to clockwise rotation of the GMP.

Current estimates of the microplate motion may be inaccurate because the limited observational data set is too small for the large vector-based calculation assumptions.

The wedge-shaped Incipient Ridge characterizes the entire motion of the NGMP, as evidenced by recent magmatic activity and magnetic anomaly profiles.