Plates Kenny Lienhard
Plates

Plate 14 of 52

Arabia

Kenny Lienhard, Plates, 2026

Palette
Jasper, from desert
Structure
Monocline
Drift
4.8 cm a year, northeast
Era
Green Arabia
4,904,218 km², a minor plate

How it is made

Finished

The Plate in detail

Arabia, seed 118

Plate 14 of 52 · one of one

Traits

Palette
Jasper
Structure
Monocline
Event
Unconformity
Faults
None
Scale
Standard
Hang
Level
Accent
Repeated
Era
Green Arabia
Heading
Northeast, 41.9°
Speed
4.83 cm a year

History

The past. Green Arabia: the summer monsoon moved north over southern Arabia 10,676 to 9,276 years ago, then retreated 6,695 to 6,057 years ago. Only the desert beds change colour, all at once, and only inside those windows.

850 million years ago
Volcanic arcs formed and welded together over about 300 million years, building much of this plate's continental crust.
31 million years ago
A mantle plume erupted flood lavas, and rifts began to tear Arabia away from Africa.
27.5 million years ago
Arabia began to collide with Eurasia, raising the Zagros mountains.
19.6 million years ago
The Dead Sea Transform, a great sideways fault, began to form on this plate's western edge.

Sources: Fleitmann et al. 2007, Quaternary Science Reviews 26:170 · Stern and Johnson 2010, Earth-Science Reviews 101:29 · Bosworth, Huchon and McClay 2005, Journal of African Earth Sciences 43:334 · McQuarrie and van Hinsbergen 2013, Geology 41:315 · Nuriel et al. 2017, Geology 45:587

Technical notes

The file

90,335bytes, the whole work
74,112bytes of engine, gzip and base64
0network requests
2048 pxdrawn on up to 8 workers, at your screen’s size

One HTML file: the engine (151,144 bytes minified), this plate's data and a small loader. It reads your clock and slides the view to where the plate is today.

engine sha256 a7fbc03acc0fc9ba343881bb88ddaf2b7564564d8bc9cbed16e75e47e01fb3f2

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.

The work

Live

One HTML file that drifts with your clock, a few centimetres a year.