Altiplano, Plates, Kenny Lienhard

The Plate in detail

Altiplano, seed 282

Plate 22 of 52 · one of one

Traits

Palette: Basalt
Structure: Nappe
Event: None
Faults: None
Scale: Bold
Hang: Level
Accent: Repeated
Era: Lake Tauca
Heading: North-northeast, 25.4°
Speed: 1.73 cm a year

History

The past. Lake Tauca: near the end of the ice age the rains over the central Altiplano grew to more than twice today’s, and from 17,076 to 16,576 years ago a shallow lake on the salt flats rose into one great lake over what are now the Salar de Uyuni, the Salar de Coipasa and Lake Poopó. At its height it covered about 52,000 square kilometres, a sixteenth of the plate, and was up to about 120 metres deep, the largest lake there in more than 100,000 years, while glaciers on the peaks around it held their ground or advanced again. It shrank in less than a thousand years, 14,576 to 13,576 years ago, and the basin dried; a smaller lake, Lake Coipasa, came back about 13,000 to 11,900 years ago. The pale beds, read here as the salt and the pale ground, turn halfway to the colour of water, all at once, and only across those spans.

10 million years ago: The high plateau of the central Andes rose by about 2.5 km in a few million years.

Sources: Martin et al. 2018, Science Advances 4:eaar2514; Placzek et al. 2006, GSA Bulletin 118:515; Placzek et al. 2011, Quaternary Research 75:231; Nunnery et al. 2019, Quaternary Research 91:881; Martin et al. 2020, Quaternary Science Reviews 247:106542 · Garzione et al. 2008, Science 320:1304

Onchain

The file

94,212bytes, the whole work

74,112bytes of code that draws it

4,141bytes 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: Altiplano, a micro plate in Bird’s PB2002 model: 832,153 km², 15% ocean
Its motion: A pole at 8.62°S 86.61°W turning 0.481° per million years; at its centre 1.7 cm a year, heading north-northeast
What covers it: bare rock 25%, tundra 15%, grassland 11%, forest 11%, and twelve more
Its past: Lake Tauca, between 17,076 and 13,576 years ago, with its account and source
Deep history: One dated events, the oldest 10 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.

Altiplano

Finished