Balmoral Reef, Plates, Kenny Lienhard

The Plate in detail

Balmoral Reef, seed 560

Plate 40 of 52 · one of one

Traits

Palette: Opal
Structure: Nappe
Event: None
Faults: None
Scale: Standard
Hang: Level
Accent: Single
Heading: West-northwest, 289.9°
Speed: 4.52 cm a year

History

The past. This plate is open ocean floor, most of it 2,300 to 3,200 metres deep, and no ice reached these tropical waters, so the ice age changed little here. At its peak, about 20,000 years ago, the sea stood about 130 metres lower, and the top of Balmoral Reef, the seamount the plate is named after, may have stood above the waves as a small island. The surface sea was about 3 to 4 degrees cooler then, and it warmed mostly between 16,000 and 11,000 years ago.

12 million years ago: The North Fiji Basin, where this small plate lies, began to open.

Sources: ETOPO 2022, NOAA NCEI; Lhardy et al. 2021, Climate of the Past 17:1139; Lambeck et al. 2014, PNAS 111:15296; Marine Regions gazetteer, MRGID 34702; Ryan et al. 2009, Geochemistry Geophysics Geosystems 10:Q03014; Osman et al. 2021, Nature 599:239; Tierney et al. 2020, Nature 584:569; lgmDA v2.1, Zenodo · Crameri et al. 2020, Nature Communications 11:3750 · Schellart, Lister and Toy 2006, Earth-Science Reviews 76:191

Onchain

The file

94,419bytes, the whole work

74,112bytes of code that draws it

4,337bytes 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: Balmoral Reef, a micro plate in Bird’s PB2002 model: 195,383 km², 100% ocean
Its motion: A pole at 65.00°S 133.04°E turning 0.481° per million years; at its centre 4.5 cm a year, heading west-northwest
What covers it: slope and ridge 69%, deep ocean 31%, shelf sea under 1%
Its past: Its account of the last 30,000 years, with its source
Deep history: One dated events, the oldest 12 million years ago, each with its source
Its outline: 94 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.

Balmoral Reef

Finished