Cocos Ridge
aseismic ridge within the Cocos plate
The Cocos Ridge is an aseismic ridge within the Cocos plate that runs northeastwards from just north of the Galápagos islands to the Middle America Trench offshore Panama. It records the effects of the Galápagos hotspot on the Cocos plate since the establishment of the Cocos–Nazca spreading centre during the break-up of the Farallon plate towards the end of the Oligocene epoch. It is the counterpart to the Carnegie Ridge, which developed on the Nazca plate.
Cocos Island is the only emergent part of the ridge. The volcanic activity that formed the island is much younger than the part of the ridge where it is located.
Extent
The Cocos Ridge is a ~1000 km long bathymetric high, varying in width up to 200 km. It lies entirely within the Cocos plate. The presence of a shallow area between the Galápagos islands and Cocos Island was first identified by Alexander Agassiz in 1892, naming it the Galapagos Plateau. After the acquisition of more depth soundings it became clear that the shallow area continued almost up to the coast and it was given the name Cocos Ridge in 1950, for Cocos Island. The ridge is typically about 2–3000 m shallower than the nearby areas of the Cocos plate.
“Cocos Ridge” enters the record as aseismic ridge within the Cocos plate. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Cocos, Ridge and aseismic can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 20, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q131625895. Authority coordinates are 5.000, -86.000. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1000, 1892 and 1950.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cocos Ridge” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.