They have been transported about 300 miles (500 kilometers) in a north-northwestward direction along the transform plate boundary.

The granite rocks in the foreground are similar to those found in Yosemite National Park in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Tomales Bay is the surface expression of the San Andreas Fault, seen in the photo below. Point Reyes National Seashore, California. Lateral Movement along a Transform Plate Boundary Virgin Islands is located on another transform plate boundary, where the Caribbean Plate is sliding past the oceanic part of the North American Plate. The landscapes of Channel Islands National Park, Pinnacles National Park, Point Reyes National Seashore and many other NPS sites in California are products of such a broad zone of deformation, where the Pacific Plate moves north-northwestward past the rest of North America. Perhaps nowhere on Earth is such a landscape more dramatically displayed than along the San Andreas Fault in western California.

The grinding action between the plates at a transform plate boundary results in shallow earthquakes, large lateral displacement of rock, and a broad zone of crustal deformation. Such boundaries are called transform plate boundaries because they connect other plate boundaries in various combinations, transforming the site of plate motion. Instead, blocks of crust are torn apart in a broad zone of shearing between the two plates. Where tectonic plates slip horizontally past one another, lithosphere is neither created nor destroyed.

Transform boundary landforms