Australia, Plates, Kenny Lienhard

The Plate in detail

Australia, seed 6

Plate 6 of 52 · one of one

Traits

Palette: Oxide
Structure: Domino faults
Event: Unconformity
Faults: Two
Scale: Standard
Hang: Level
Accent: Single
Era: Sahul
Heading: North-northeast, 30.0°
Speed: 6.87 cm a year

History

The past. Sahul: with the sea about 120 metres lower, Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania were one continent, and more than two million square kilometres of today’s shallow seas were dry land, from the plains of the Gulf of Carpentaria, where a lake grew larger than Tasmania, to the land bridge across Bass Strait. Sahul was already whole when the timeline begins; the rising sea drowned most of it between 14,676 and 8,076 years ago. The lines that stand for the sea turn three quarters of the way to the colour of land, all at once, and only across those spans.

4.4 billion years ago: Zircon crystals formed that are among the oldest known pieces of Earth; they survive in younger rocks on this plate.
136 million years ago: A new ocean ridge began to split India away from this plate's western edge.
83.5 million years ago: After a long rift, Australia broke away from Antarctica.
83 million years ago: The Tasman Sea began to open as the Lord Howe Rise drifted away from Australia.
51.5 million years ago: A major reorganization of plate motions changed how Australia and Antarctica moved apart.
16 million years ago: This part of the Indian Ocean floor began to press slowly against India, and a wide zone between them began to buckle.
8 million years ago: The squeeze doubled in speed, and the ocean floor between this plate and India folded into long waves.
6 million years ago: The northern edge of the Australian continent began to jam into the volcanic arc to its north, pushing up Timor.
6 million years ago: Far south of New Zealand, the Macquarie part of this plate began to move on its own as a small rigid plate.

Sources: Williams et al. 2018, Quaternary Science Reviews 182:144; Reeves et al. 2013, Quaternary Science Reviews 74:97 · Wilde et al. 2001, Nature 409:175 · Gibbons, Whittaker and Muller 2013, Journal of Geophysical Research 118:808 · Williams, Whittaker and Muller 2011, Tectonics 30:TC6012 · Gaina et al. 1998, Journal of Geophysical Research 103:12413 · Whittaker et al. 2007, Science 318:83 · Bull et al. 2010, Geology 38:307 · Royer and Gordon 1997, Science 277:1268 · Cochran 1990, Proceedings ODP Scientific Results 116 · Harris 2011, in Arc-Continent Collision (Springer) p.163 · Cande and Stock 2004, Geophysical Journal International 157:399

Onchain

The file

97,704bytes, the whole work

74,112bytes of code that draws it

7,638bytes 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: Australia, a major plate in Bird’s PB2002 model: 45,984,768 km², 82% ocean
Its motion: A pole at 33.30°N 33.41°E turning 0.640° per million years; at its centre 6.9 cm a year, heading north-northeast
What covers it: deep ocean 60%, slope and ridge 16%, desert 9%, shelf sea 6%, and eight more
Its past: Sahul, between 30,100 and 8,076 years ago, with its account and source
Deep history: Nine dated events, the oldest 4.4 billion years ago, each with its source
Its outline: 149 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.

Australia

Finished