A plate that holds two continents
The Eurasian Plate is mostly continental. It carries nearly all of Europe, from Portugal and Spain to Ukraine, plus about three quarters of Russia, all of Kazakhstan, 97% of Iran and about 69% of China. It also includes the eastern North Atlantic seafloor and part of the Arctic Ocean.
PB2002 draws the plate smaller than most textbooks do. It splits off the Amur Plate, Yangtze Plate, Sunda Plate and Okhotsk Plate in East Asia, and the Anatolian Plate and Aegean Sea Plate in the eastern Mediterranean. Geologists still debate whether several of these blocks move independently enough to count as separate plates. Under this model, Japan and most of Turkey lie off the Eurasian Plate.
What happens at its edges
The western and northern edge is divergent. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge and its Arctic extension, the Gakkel Ridge, separate Eurasia from the North American Plate along 10,767 km. Relative motion averages about 1.5 cm/yr, and it falls to only a few millimeters per year where the boundary comes ashore in eastern Siberia. In Iceland, the ridge rises above sea level and splits the island between the two plates.
The southern edge is a long belt of collision. The Indian Plate converges with Eurasia at about 4.7 cm/yr along the Himalaya, the fastest of all its boundaries. The Arabian Plate pushes in at about 3.5 cm/yr across the Zagros Mountains and the Makran coast. The African Plate closes in at only about 0.5 cm/yr across the Mediterranean, which helped raise the Alps.
Several boundaries involve smaller plates. The North Anatolian Fault carries the Anatolian Plate west past Eurasia at about 2.4 cm/yr. To the east, the Baikal Rift and related faults separate Eurasia from the Amur Plate at about 1.0 cm/yr, while the Yangtze and Sunda plates meet it at about 1.4 and 2.6 cm/yr.
How it was assembled
Eurasia grew by collisions over hundreds of millions of years. In the late Paleozoic, Baltica joined Siberia and other blocks, and the seam between them became the Ural Mountains. Later, pieces that broke off Gondwana drifted north across the Tethys Ocean and docked against Asia’s southern margin. India arrived about 50 million years ago, and the collision built the Himalaya, including Mount Everest at 8,849 m, and the high Tibetan Plateau.
Earthquakes and volcanoes
The dataset lists 367 earthquakes of magnitude 6.5 or larger on the plate since 1900, and 6 reached magnitude 8 or more. The largest was the 1950 Assam-Tibet earthquake (M8.6) near the eastern end of the Himalaya. Others include the 1934 Bihar-Nepal earthquake (M8.0) and the 1945 Makran earthquake (M8.1). Many great quakes struck far inside the continent: the 1905 Tsetserleg (M7.95) and Bulnay (M8.33) earthquakes in Mongolia, the 1957 Gobi-Altay earthquake (M8.1) and the 1911 Kemin earthquake (M8.0) in Kyrgyzstan. They show that India’s push deforms Asia thousands of kilometers from the plate edge.
The plate has 56 volcanoes in the dataset. Most of the active ones are in eastern Iceland, including Grimsvotn, Bardarbunga, Askja, Krafla and Eyjafjallajokull, whose 2010 ash cloud shut down much of Europe’s air traffic. Jan Mayen in the Arctic and Stromboli off southern Italy are also on the list.