Caroline Plate

The Caroline Plate is a small tectonic plate located north of New Guinea.

At the south end of IBM, there is almost now convergence between the Caroline Plate and the Philippine Sea Plate.

To the south, the Philippine Sea Plate is bounded by the Caroline Plate and Bird's Head Plate.

Perpendicular to the two trenches is another trench, the Mussau Trench separating the Caroline Plate and Pacific Plate.

Manus Trench is a trench delineating the oceanic boundary between the Caroline Plate and North Bismarck Plates, in Papua New Guinea.

Convergent boundaries exist along the north between the Bird's Head and the Caroline Plate, the Philippine Sea Plate, and the Halmahera Plate to the northwest.

Between the plate and the Caroline Plate is the Manus Trench and between the plate and the Pacific plate is the Kilinailai Trench.

The Manus Trench, which looks as if it is a Western continuation of the Manus Trench, marks the boundary between the Caroline Plate and North Bismarck Plates.

Interestingly, Cenozoic sediments are unimportant except for volcanic ash and Asian loess deposited adjacent to Japan and carbonate sediments associated with the relatively shallow Caroline Ridge and Caroline plate.

The HMRG Deep was most probably formed, not through transform fault motion as previously thought, but through a north-south convergence of the Caroline plate and the Pacific plate, in which the Caroline plate is subducting.

A group of scientists have hypothesized that the great depth of the Mariana Trench, the Challenger Deep, and the HMRG Deep is due to a tear in the subducting Caroline plate, causing deformation of the Pacific plate above.

The Caroline plate subducts along its northern border while the Maoke Plate converges on the west, the Australian plate converges on the south, and on the east an undefined compressive zone which may be a transform fault marking the boundary with the adjoining Solomon Sea Plate.