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The 'Philippine Plate' is an oceanic tectonic plate beneath the Pacific Ocean to the east of the Philippines. The plate represents oceanic lithosphere that lies beneath the Philippine Sea. This is a region of the Earth that is an almost entirely submerged and is bounded by the Philippines to the west, Taiwan and the Ryukyu islands to the NW, Japan to the north, the Izu-Ogasawara (Bonin) and Mariana islands to the east, and Yap, Palau, and easternmost Indonesia (Halmahera} to the south.
The easterly side of the Philippine Sea Plate is a convergent boundary with the subducting Pacific Plate at the Mariana Trench. The Philippine Plate is bounded on the west by the Eurasian Plate, on the south partly by the Indo-Australian Plate, on the north by the North American Plate and possibly by the Amurian Plate, and on the northeast by the Okhotsk Plate.
The Philippine Plate forms the floor of this sea and it is one of the 5 minor lithospheric plates, about the size of the Arabian plate (Anderson, 2002). It is unique among all of the plates that now exist on Earth because it is completely surrounded by subduction zones. The Philippine Sea Plate (PSP) is divided into a western “trapped” and inactive half and an eastern part that formed and continues to grow as a result of westward subduction of the Pacific Plate. The western half is doomed to disappear someday because it is being subducted to the west and north under the Eurasian Plate. This eastern half is composed of several N-S ridges (from W to E: Kyushu-Palau Ridge (KPR), Parece Vela-Shikoku West Marian Ridge (WMR large backarc basins (Fig. 1). The Izu-Ogasawara (Bonin) and Mariana islands and submarine volcanoes is sometimes referred to as the IBM (Izu-Bonin-Mariana) arc system.
The Izu Peninsula is the northernmost tip of the Philippine Plate. The Philippine Plate, the Eurasian Plate (or the Amurian Plate), and the North American or Okhotsk Plate meet at Mount Fuji.