Where it is and what it carries
The Timor Plate is a microplate of about 353,000 square kilometers, or 0.07% of Earth’s surface. It stretches along the eastern Lesser Sunda Islands from Flores through Timor to the Tanimbar Islands. It carries all of East Timor (Timor-Leste) and about 2% of Indonesia, including Flores, Lembata, Alor and West Timor.
The plate marks one of the clearest places on Earth where a continent has arrived at a subduction zone. For millions of years, ocean floor north of Australia sank beneath the Banda Arc. When the Australian continental margin reached the trench, it was too buoyant to sink far, and slices of it were stacked up to form the island of Timor.
What happens at its edges
The southern boundary with the Australian Plate is 1,446 km long. PB2002 divides it into a mix of rift, transform and collision steps, which reflects how messy the collision is. It roughly follows the Timor Trough, a shallow trough on the Australian side, and moves at about 1.7-2.9 cm/yr.
The northern boundary with the Banda Sea Plate is 1,383 km of convergence moving at about 2.3-3.5 cm/yr. Here the floor of the seas behind the arc is being pushed beneath the islands along back-arc thrust faults north of Flores and Wetar. In the west, a 419 km transform boundary with the Sunda Plate moves at about 4.1 cm/yr.
Earthquakes and volcanoes
The dataset lists 50 earthquakes of magnitude 6.5 or larger on the plate since 1900. The largest is the 1963 Banda Sea earthquake (M8.1), about 110 km deep. The 1992 Flores earthquake (M7.8) struck on the back-arc thrust and caused a tsunami that devastated parts of the north coast of Flores. Other large events include a 2026 earthquake near Ende on Flores (M7.8), the 2023 Tanimbar earthquake (M7.6) and the 2004 earthquake near Maubara, Timor-Leste (M7.5).
The plate holds 17 volcanoes in the dataset, nearly all in the volcanic arc from Flores to Alor. Lewotobi, on eastern Flores, is among the most active, and Lewotolok, Iliwerung and Sirung rise from the smaller islands to the east. Timor itself has no active volcanoes, because it is built from the scraped-up continental margin rather than the volcanic arc.