Birds Head, Plates, Kenny Lienhard

The Plate in detail

Birds Head, seed 234

Plate 26 of 52 · one of one

Traits

Palette: Malachite
Structure: Chevron folds
Event: Unconformity
Faults: None
Scale: Standard
Hang: Level
Accent: Single
Era: Sahul’s edge
Heading: West-northwest, 302.9°
Speed: 6.67 cm a year

History

The past. With the sea about 120 metres lower, about a fifth of this plate’s sea, more than 80,000 square kilometres, was dry land. Misool, Salawati and Yapen were joined to New Guinea, Bintuni Bay and the Berau Gulf were plains, and the Bird’s Head was the northwest corner of Sahul, facing Halmahera across deep water. Waigeo and Batanta may have stayed an island. The land was already dry when the timeline begins; the rising sea drowned most of it between 15,426 and 7,256 years ago. The lines that stand for the sea turn to the colour of land, all at once, and only across those spans.

15 million years ago: Subduction began beneath the Halmahera arc on this plate's western edge; the date is debated.

Sources: Lambeck et al. 2014, PNAS 111:15296; Günther et al. 2015, Zoosystematics and Evolution 91:199; Diamond and Bishop 2020, Bulletin of the British Ornithologists’ Club 140:423 · Crameri et al. 2020, Nature Communications 11:3750

Onchain

The file

93,747bytes, the whole work

74,112bytes of code that draws it

3,661bytes 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: Birds Head, a micro plate in Bird’s PB2002 model: 525,655 km², 72% ocean
Its motion: A pole at 41.57°S 97.77°E turning 0.774° per million years; at its centre 6.7 cm a year, heading west-northwest
What covers it: slope and ridge 45%, rainforest 26%, shelf sea 20%, deep ocean 6%, and five more
Its past: Sahul’s edge, between 30,100 and 7,256 years ago, with its account and source
Deep history: One dated events, the oldest 15 million years ago, each with its source
Its outline: 47 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.

Birds Head

Finished