[Rockhounds] 'Lost' tectonic plate called Resurrection hidden under the Pacific

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

Scientists have reconstructed a long-lost *tectonic plate*
<https://www.livescience.com/37706-what-is-plate-tectonics.html> that may
have given rise to an arc of volcanoes in the Pacific Ocean 60 million
years ago.

The plate, dubbed Resurrection, has long been controversial among
geophysicists, as some believe it never existed. But the new reconstruction
puts the edge of the rocky plate along a line of known ancient *volcanoes*
<https://www.livescience.com/27295-volcanoes.html>, suggesting that it was
once part of the crust (Earth's top layer) in what is today northern
Canada.

"Volcanoes form at plate boundaries, and the more plates you have, the more
volcanoes you have," Jonny Wu, a geologist at the University of Houston, *said
in a statement*
<https://phys.org/news/2020-10-geologists-resurrect-tectonic-plate.html>.
"Volcanoes also affect *climate change*
<https://www.livescience.com/climate-change.html>. So, when you are trying
to model the Earth and understand how climate has changed ... you really
want to know how many volcanoes there have been on *Earth*
<https://www.livescience.com/earth.html>."

Wu and his co-author, University of Houston geology doctoral candidate
Spencer Fuston, used a computer model of Earth's crust to "unfold" the
movement of tectonic plates since the early *Cenozoic*
<https://www.livescience.com/40352-cenozoic-era.html>, the geological era
that began 66 million years ago. Geophysicists already knew that there were
two plates in the Pacific at that time, the Kula plate and the Farallon
plate.

Because lots of *magma* <https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/70025386> is
present east of the former location of these plates in what is today Alaska
and Washington, some geophysicists argued there was a missing piece in the
puzzle — a theoretical plate they called Resurrection. This magma would
have been left behind by volcanic activity at the plate's edge.

https://www.livescience.com/lost-tectonic-plate-resurrection-pacific.html