Where it is and what it carries
The African Plate holds most of the African continent west of the East African Rift, the eastern half of the central and South Atlantic seafloor, and the floor of the eastern Mediterranean. PB2002 calls it the Africa Plate. When the Somali Plate is split off to the east, many geologists call the remaining western block the Nubian Plate.
Nearly all of Algeria, Egypt, Nigeria, Morocco and the Democratic Republic of the Congo sit on it. About 71% of South Africa lies on this plate, and Ethiopia is split almost in half by the rift. The plate also carries Atlantic island groups such as the Canary Islands and Cape Verde, and its northern edge takes in Sicily, Malta and most of Israel.
What happens at its edges
Spreading ridges make up most of the boundary. To the west, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge separates Africa from the South American Plate at about 3.2 cm/yr. That is the plate’s longest boundary, close to 15,000 km. Farther north, the same ridge divides it from the North American Plate at about 2.3 cm/yr. In the far south, the western Southwest Indian Ridge parts it from the Antarctic Plate at about 1.4 cm/yr, one of the slowest spreading rates on Earth.
On the east, the East African Rift splits the continent from the Somali Plate at only 0.3 cm/yr on average. The Red Sea rift and the Dead Sea Transform form the boundary with the Arabian Plate, where relative motion is about 1.4 cm/yr.
The northern edge is the only part where plates come together. Africa converges with the Eurasian Plate at about 0.5 cm/yr through a mix of collision zones, short subduction zones and transform faults that run from the Azores across the western and central Mediterranean. In the east, African seafloor sinks into the Hellenic Trench beneath the Aegean Sea Plate at about 3.8 cm/yr, and beneath the Anatolian Plate along the Cyprus Arc at about 1.4 cm/yr.
How the plate took shape
Africa sat near the center of the supercontinent Pangaea. The central Atlantic began to open in the Jurassic, when North America pulled away from northwest Africa, and the South Atlantic opened in the Cretaceous as South America separated. The matching coastlines of Brazil and West Africa were one of the first clues to continental drift. On the eastern side, Madagascar and India broke away as the southern supercontinent Gondwana came apart.
Because its only subduction zones are short ones in the Mediterranean, the African Plate lacks the strong slab pull that drives fast plates such as the Pacific. It moves slowly, and its interior contains some of the oldest and most stable continental crust on Earth, including the Kaapvaal and Congo cratons.
Earthquakes and volcanoes
The plate has recorded 38 earthquakes of magnitude 6.5 or larger since 1900, and none reached magnitude 8. The largest, a M7.9 in 1975, struck the Azores-Gibraltar fracture zone in the open Atlantic. A M7.8 followed in 1969 about 188 km southwest of Sagres, Portugal, in the same offshore region as the great 1755 Lisbon earthquake. On land, the strongest was the 1980 El Asnam earthquake (M7.3) near Chlef, Algeria, and a M7.1 struck north of Juba, South Sudan, in 1990. The central Mid-Atlantic Ridge produced events just above M7 in 1918, 1942 and 1984.
The dataset lists 62 volcanoes on the plate. Nyiragongo and Nyamulagira in the Virunga Mountains of the DRC sit on the western branch of the rift and are among Africa’s most active; Nyiragongo’s lava reached the city of Goma in 2002 and 2021. In the Afar region of Ethiopia, Dallol, Alu-Dalafilla, Manda Hararo and Dabbahu mark the area where the African, Somali and Arabian plates pull apart. Hotspot islands in the Atlantic are active too: La Palma erupted in 2021 and Fogo in Cape Verde in 2014. Mount Etna on Sicily, one of the most active volcanoes in the world, also lies on the African side of the boundary in PB2002.