Tethyan Trench Tethyan Trench The Tethyan Trench was an ancient oceanic trench that existed in the northern part of the Tethys Ocean during the middle Mesozoic to early Cenozoic eras. The Tethyan Trench formed when the Cimmerian Plate was subducting under eastern Laurasia, around 200 million years ago, in the Early Jurassic. The Tethyan Trench extended at its greatest during Late Cretaceous to Paleocene, from what is now Greece to the Western Pacific Ocean. Subduction at the Tethyan Trench probably caused the continents Africa and India to move towards Eurasia, which resulted in the opening of the Indian Ocean. When the Arabian
Japan Trench within the Japan Trench consist mainly of highly localized clay-rich material. The subducting Pacific Plate creates basins along the ocean floor of the Japan Trench, accommodating the deposition of fine-grained turbidites and interseismic sediment deposits through turbidity currents. These turbidites preserve the sediment deposits as a geologic record of past large earthquakes by indicating the change in sediment deposition through sediment gravity flow. The small deep-sea basins with high sedimentation rates found along the Japan Trench fault line pose favorable environmental conditions for the studying of turbidite paleoseismology. During an exploration to the Japan Trench on January 1, 1999, a