To its east lies the Sunda Plate, from which it is separated along a transform boundary, running in a rough north-south line through the Andaman Sea.
This boundary between the Burma and Sunda plates is a marginal seafloor spreading centre, which has lead to the opening up of the Andaman Sea (from a southerly direction) by "pushing out" the Andaman-Nicobar-Sumatra island arc from mainland Asia, a process which began in earnest approximately 4 million years ago.
On December 26, 2004, a large portion of the boundary between the Burma Plate and the Indo-Australian Plate slipped, causing the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake.
The trench is a seam of tectonic plates, the Burma and Sunda on the east, and the India Plate on the west.
There is scientific evidence that the recent earthquake activity in the area of the Java Trench could lead to further catastrophic shifting within a relatively short period of time, perhaps less than a decade [1].
Some of the earliest exploration of the Trench occurred in the late 1950s when Robert Fisher, Research Geologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, investigated the trench as part of a world wide scientific field exploration of the world's ocean floor and sub-oceanic crustal-structure.
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