Amur, Plates, Kenny Lienhard

The Plate in detail

Amur, seed 13

Plate 13 of 52 · one of one

Traits

Palette: Kaolin
Structure: Monocline
Event: None
Faults: None
Scale: Standard
Hang: Level
Accent: Repeated
Era: Low seas
Heading: East-southeast, 121.1°
Speed: 3.32 cm a year

History

The past. With the sea about 120 metres lower, about 300,000 square kilometres of this plate’s seas were dry land, a quarter of them: the shelf around the Korea Strait and Jeju, the Seto Inland Sea, which joined Kyushu, Shikoku and Honshu, and the north of the Tatar Strait, which joined Sakhalin to the mainland. Only shallow straits linked the Sea of Japan to the ocean, and its surface water turned fresher. The land was already dry when the timeline begins; the rising sea drowned most of it between 16,236 and 8,136 years ago. The line that stands for the sea turns to the colour of land, all at once, and only across those spans.

30 million years ago: The Baikal rift began to open along this plate's northwest edge.
19.5 million years ago: The Sea of Japan opened, pulling the Japanese islands away from mainland Asia.

Sources: Lambeck et al. 2014, PNAS 111:15296; Sagawa et al. 2018, Progress in Earth and Planetary Science 5:18; Oba et al. 1991, Paleoceanography 6:499 · Petit and Deverchere 2006, Geochemistry Geophysics Geosystems 7:Q11016 · Jolivet, Tamaki and Fournier 1994, Journal of Geophysical Research 99:22237 · ICS International Chronostratigraphic Chart v2024/12 (Cohen et al. 2013, updated), stratigraphy.org

Onchain

The file

95,847bytes, the whole work

74,112bytes of code that draws it

5,783bytes 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: Amur, a minor plate in Bird’s PB2002 model: 5,303,397 km², 22% ocean
Its motion: A pole at 43.30°N 99.04°W turning 0.302° per million years; at its centre 3.3 cm a year, heading east-southeast
What covers it: boreal forest 26%, forest 14%, grassland 14%, cropland 12%, and nine more
Its past: Low seas, between 30,100 and 8,136 years ago, with its account and source
Deep history: Two dated events, the oldest 30 million years ago, each with its source
Its outline: 150 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.

Amur

Finished