Antarctica, Plates, Kenny Lienhard

The Plate in detail

Antarctica, seed 107

Plate 3 of 52 · one of one

Traits

Palette: Opal
Structure: Graben
Event: Unconformity
Faults: Two
Scale: Standard
Hang: Level
Accent: Single
Era: Glacial sea ice
Heading: West, 276.5°
Speed: 0.94 cm a year

History

The past. The ice age: sea ice that lasted through the summer covered two to three times today’s area, mostly off the Weddell and Ross seas, and the ice sheet reached out across much of the continental shelf, so a sixth to a quarter of today’s open sea on the plate lay under ice even in summer. The ice was already there when the timeline begins; it drew back roughly 19,076 to 11,296 years ago. The lines that stand for the open sea turn paler, toward ice, all at once, and only across those spans.

3.9 billion years ago: Some of the oldest known rocks on Earth formed, now found in East Antarctica.
182.8 million years ago: Huge volumes of magma spread through the crust as the supercontinent Gondwana began to break apart.
136 million years ago: A new ocean ridge began to split India away from Antarctica and Australia.
83.5 million years ago: After a long rift, Australia broke away from Antarctica.
50 million years ago: South America began to pull away faster from the Antarctic Peninsula, starting to open the Drake Passage.

Sources: Lhardy et al. 2021, Climate of the Past 17:1139; Crosta et al. 2022, Climate of the Past 18:1729; Bentley et al. 2014, Quaternary Science Reviews 100:1 · Black, Williams and Compston 1986, Contributions to Mineralogy and Petrology 94:427 · Hiess and Bennett 2016, Chemical Geology 427:125 · Burgess et al. 2015, Earth and Planetary Science Letters 415:90 · Mueller and Jokat 2019, Tectonophysics 750:301 · Gibbons, Whittaker and Muller 2013, Journal of Geophysical Research 118:808 · Williams, Whittaker and Muller 2011, Tectonics 30:TC6012 · Livermore et al. 2005, Earth and Planetary Science Letters 236:459 · Eagles and Jokat 2014, Tectonophysics 611:28

Onchain

The file

97,068bytes, the whole work

74,112bytes of code that draws it

6,996bytes 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: Antarctica, a major plate in Bird’s PB2002 model: 58,149,635 km², 76% ocean
Its motion: A pole at 62.06°N 117.13°W turning 0.231° per million years; at its centre 0.9 cm a year, heading west
What covers it: deep ocean 62%, ice 24%, slope and ridge 10%, sea ice 4%, and three more
Its past: Glacial sea ice, between 30,100 and 11,296 years ago, with its account and source
Deep history: Six dated events, the oldest 3.9 billion 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.

Antarctica

Finished