Where it is and what it carries
The North Andes Plate covers about 972,000 square kilometers, or 0.19% of Earth’s surface. It holds about 43% of Colombia, 36% of Ecuador, 12% of Venezuela and a small part of eastern Panama near the Colombian border. It includes the Andes of Ecuador and western and central Colombia, so cities such as Quito, Bogota, Medellin and Cali sit on it.
The crust is mostly continental, though its western part includes slices of oceanic crust that were added to South America over millions of years.
Why geologists separate it
The North Andes Plate is often called the North Andean Block or North Andean Sliver. As the Nazca Plate pushes in at an angle from the west, a wedge of the northern Andes gets squeezed and slides northeast, away from the rest of the continent. GPS data show this motion clearly. Still, many textbooks and plate models include the region in the South American Plate, and its boundaries are broad fault zones rather than single faults.
What happens at its edges
The longest boundary, 2,372 km, is with the South American Plate. It follows the eastern edge of the Andes, from the Gulf of Guayaquil in Ecuador to the Boconó Fault in Venezuela, combining thrust faults and strike-slip faults. The relative speed along it is only about 0.9 cm/yr.
On the west, the Nazca Plate subducts beneath the plate at the Colombia-Ecuador Trench at about 5.7 cm/yr. In the north, the Caribbean Plate slowly underthrusts northern Colombia along the Southern Caribbean Deformed Belt at about 1.2 cm/yr. In the northwest, the Panama Plate presses against Colombia at about 1.3 cm/yr.
Earthquakes and volcanoes
The dataset lists 44 earthquakes of magnitude 6.5 or larger on the plate since 1900. The largest was the 1906 Ecuador-Colombia earthquake (M8.8), one of the biggest ever recorded. The same subduction zone produced M7.8 earthquakes in 1942 and 2016 near Pedernales, Ecuador, and an M7.7 earthquake in 1979 off the Colombia-Ecuador border. Some strong quakes are deep: an M7.3 event in 2012 struck 170 km below southern Colombia, and an M7.4 event in 2026 struck 116 km below western Colombia.
The plate holds 25 volcanoes in the dataset. Nevado del Ruiz and Purace in Colombia were active in 2026. Cotopaxi in Ecuador (5,911 m) erupted in 2023, and Guagua Pichincha, which rises above Quito, erupted in 2002. Galeras, near the Colombian city of Pasto, last erupted in 2014.