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East Pacific Rise

American  
[eest puh-sif-ik rahyz] / ˈist pəˈsɪf ɪk ˈraɪz /

noun

  1. a long north-south elevation of the seafloor in the eastern Pacific Ocean extending southward from southwestern Mexico to the Southern Ocean, separating the Pacific Plate from the North American, Rivera, Cocos, Nazca, and Antarctic Plates. EPR


Etymology

Origin of East Pacific Rise

First recorded in 1960–65

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

See Examples For:

Together, they focused on the Gofar transform fault, located along the East Pacific Rise off Ecuador's western coast, in an effort to solve a decades-long mystery surrounding these repeating underwater earthquakes.

From Science Daily May 16, 2026

Researchers at Hokkaido University, in collaboration with colleagues at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, have been working on understanding microbial diversity at deep-sea hydrothermal environments on the East Pacific Rise based on microbe cultivation studies.

From Science Daily Nov. 29, 2023

The team focused its ROV dives on an area where diverging tectonic plates create a string of deep-sea volcanoes known as the East Pacific Rise.

From Scientific American Aug. 9, 2023

Along divergent boundaries like the mid- Atlantic ridge and the East Pacific Rise, earthquakes are common, but restricted to a narrow zone close to the ridge, and consistently at less than 30 km depth.

From Textbooks Jan. 1, 2015

As North America slowly crept westward away from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, Wilson says, the west coast of the continent eventually met up with another segment of the ridge system called the East Pacific Rise.

From Time Magazine Archive

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