Aegean Sea, Plates, Kenny Lienhard

The Plate in detail

Aegean Sea, seed 35

Plate 35 of 52 · one of one

Traits

Palette: Rhyolite
Structure: Horst
Event: Unconformity
Faults: Two
Scale: Standard
Hang: Level
Accent: Single
Era: Mega-Cyclades
Heading: South-southeast, 156.9°
Speed: 1.53 cm a year

History

The past. With the sea about 120 metres lower, the central Cyclades were one island, from Andros to Ios, and the islands off Turkey from Lesbos to Kos were joined to Asia. The plate had about half again as much land as today. Most of it was already dry when the timeline begins; the rising sea drowned it between 16,243 and 8,325 years ago. The lines that stand for the sea turn to the colour of land, all at once, and only across those spans.

32.5 million years ago: The Aegean began to stretch and thin as the sinking slab to its south pulled back.

Sources: Lambeck et al. 2014, PNAS 111:15296; Simaiakis et al. 2017, Palaeogeography Palaeoclimatology Palaeoecology 471:108; Lambeck 1996, Antiquity 70:588 · Jolivet and Brun 2010 (online 2008), International Journal of Earth Sciences 99:109

Onchain

The file

93,598bytes, the whole work

74,112bytes of code that draws it

3,518bytes of its record, plain text

0network requests

One HTML file, to be etched to Ethereum in full: the code that draws the work (151,144 bytes before compression), this plate’s settings and its record. Nothing is fetched from anywhere else. It reads your clock and slides the view to where the plate is today.

engine sha256 a7fbc03acc0fc9ba343881bb88ddaf2b7564564d8bc9cbed16e75e47e01fb3f2

The record inside it

The plate: Aegean Sea, a micro plate in Bird’s PB2002 model: 321,878 km², 78% ocean
Its motion: A pole at 19.38°N 128.06°E turning 0.138° per million years; at its centre 1.5 cm a year, heading south-southeast
What covers it: slope and ridge 54%, shelf sea 18%, grassland 8%, cropland 7%, and eight more
Its past: Mega-Cyclades, between 30,100 and 8,325 years ago, with its account and source
Deep history: One dated events, the oldest 32 million years ago, each with its source
Its outline: 49 points, to a hundredth of a degree
Licence: CC0 1.0, no rights reserved

Read the record

Sources

The plate, its outline and its motionBird, P. (2003). An updated digital model of plate boundaries. Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems 4(3), 1027.
What covers it, which chose the paletteESA CCI Land Cover and Water Bodies, ETOPO 2022, Köppen-Geiger climate maps, NSIDC Sea Ice Index.

Aegean Sea

Finished