User:Mikenorton/sandbox

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Central Mexico forms part of the mainly continental North American plate, which in this area is interacting with two other plates, the Rivera and Cocos plates, both oceanic in type. From the Late Cretaceous through to the early Miocene, the destructive margin between the Farallon plate (before its split into the Rivera and Cocos plates) and the North American plate, was marked by arc magmatism along the line of the present-day Sierra Madre del Sur on Mexico's Pacific coast. Exhumed plutonic rocks from this arc are currently exposed along the coast and offshore very close to the Central American Trench, indicating that a substantial part of the forearc has been removed, either as a forearc segment that has slid away to the southeast (the Chortis Block) or by subduction erosion, or a combination of these two mechanisms.