Banda Sea, Plates, Kenny Lienhard

The Plate in detail

Banda Sea, seed 179

Plate 23 of 52 · one of one

Traits

Palette: Malachite
Structure: Nappe
Event: None
Faults: None
Scale: Standard
Hang: Level
Accent: Single
Era: Low seas
Heading: Northeast, 44.6°
Speed: 3.23 cm a year

History

The past. With the sea about 120 metres lower, about 34,000 square kilometres of this plate’s shallow seas were dry land. Buton, Muna, Wawonii and Kabaena were joined to Sulawesi, Ambon and Boano to Seram, and the two Kai islands became one, more than three times their size today. But deep water still parted every island from Asia and from New Guinea. The land was already dry when the timeline begins; the rising sea drowned most of it between 14,386 and 6,826 years ago. The lines that stand for the sea turn part of the way to the colour of land, all at once, and only across those spans.

15 million years ago: Subduction began to tear east into an old ocean embayment, and the Banda arc began to curl as the sinking slab rolled back.

Sources: Lambeck et al. 2014, PNAS 111:15296; Bird et al. 2019, Scientific Reports 9:8220; Ó Marcaigh et al. 2021, Zoologischer Anzeiger 293:314 · Spakman and Hall 2010, Nature Geoscience 3:562

Onchain

The file

94,041bytes, the whole work

74,112bytes of code that draws it

3,962bytes 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: Banda Sea, a micro plate in Bird’s PB2002 model: 695,914 km², 82% ocean
Its motion: A pole at 0.16°N 120.61°E turning 2.326° per million years; at its centre 3.2 cm a year, heading northeast
What covers it: slope and ridge 37%, deep ocean 36%, rainforest 11%, shelf sea 7%, and six more
Its past: Low seas, between 30,100 and 6,826 years ago, with its account and source
Deep history: One dated events, the oldest 15 million years ago, each with its source
Its outline: 66 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.

Banda Sea

Finished