Birds Head

Kenny Lienhard, Plates, 2026

Palette: Malachite, from rainforest
Structure: Chevron folds
Drift: 6.7 cm a year, west-northwest

525,655 km², a micro plate

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
Heading: West-northwest, 302.9°
Speed: 6.67 cm a year

History

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

Sources: Crameri et al. 2020, Nature Communications 11:3750

Technical notes

The file

90,032bytes, 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.