Where it is and what it carries
The Arabian Plate is a minor plate made mostly of continental crust, with young oceanic crust along the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden and the Gulf of Oman. It carries all of Saudi Arabia, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Jordan, and nearly all of Yemen, Iraq and Syria. Its northern tip takes in about 11% of Turkey, and its western edge includes parts of Lebanon and Israel east of the Dead Sea Transform.
PB2002 also places the Danakil region of Eritrea, Djibouti and northeastern Ethiopia on this plate. That is why volcanoes such as Erta Ale count as Arabian here, even though they sit on the African side of the Red Sea.
What happens at its edges
To the southwest, the plate meets the African Plate along the Red Sea rift and the Dead Sea Transform, with relative motion of about 1.4 cm/yr. The Dead Sea Transform is a strike-slip fault that runs from the Gulf of Aqaba north through the Jordan Valley into Lebanon and Syria. The Dead Sea itself fills a basin that opened along the fault.
To the south, the Gulf of Aden spreading ridge separates Arabia from the Somali Plate at about 2.4 cm/yr. In the east, the Owen Fracture Zone in the Arabian Sea is a slow transform boundary with the Indian Plate, moving at about 0.7 cm/yr.
The northern edge is where Arabia meets the Eurasian Plate, converging at about 3.5 cm/yr on average in PB2002. Most of this 3,300 km boundary is continental collision across the Zagros Mountains of Iran. Farther east, along the Makran coast, Arabian seafloor from the Gulf of Oman sinks beneath Iran and Pakistan. In the northwest, the East Anatolian Fault and the Bitlis collision zone form the boundary with the Anatolian Plate, with motion of about 1.6 cm/yr.
How Arabia broke away from Africa
Arabia was part of Africa until rifting began in the Oligocene and Miocene epochs. The Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden opened as two arms of the rift, meeting at Afar with the East African Rift. As Arabia moved north, the ocean that once lay between it and Eurasia closed, and the collision folded the thick sedimentary layers of the Zagros. Those folds trap some of the largest oil and gas fields on Earth in Iran, Iraq and the Persian Gulf states.
Earthquakes and volcanoes
The dataset counts 8 earthquakes of magnitude 6.5 or larger on the plate since 1900. The largest was the 2023 Pazarcık earthquake (M7.8) in the Kahramanmaraş sequence on the East Anatolian Fault, followed by a M6.7 aftershock. The 1995 Gulf of Aqaba earthquake (M7.2) struck on the Dead Sea Transform south of Nuweiba, Egypt. Others include a M6.8 near Sincik, Turkey, in 1905, the M6.7 Lice earthquake in 1975, a M6.6 in the Red Sea off Eritrea in 1977 and a M6.6 in the Gulf of Aden in 2006. Many large Zagros earthquakes plot on the Eurasian side of the boundary.
The plate holds 38 volcanoes. Erta Ale in Ethiopia is known for its long-lived lava lake, and Nabro in Eritrea erupted in 2011. In the southern Red Sea, the Zubair Group built new islands during eruptions in 2011-2013, and Jebel at Tair erupted in 2007. In western Saudi Arabia, Harrat Rahat and other lava fields record volcanism linked to the opening of the Red Sea.