Plates Kenny Lienhard
Plates

Plate 16 of 52

Caribbean

Kenny Lienhard, Plates, 2026

Palette
Azurite, from ocean
Structure
Syncline
Drift
1.2 cm a year, northeast
2,964,754 km², a minor plate

How it is made

Finished

The Plate in detail

Caribbean, seed 588

Plate 16 of 52 · one of one

Traits

Palette
Azurite
Structure
Syncline
Event
None
Faults
None
Scale
Standard
Hang
Level
Accent
Repeated
Heading
Northeast, 55.2°
Speed
1.21 cm a year

History

89 million years ago
Huge lava floods thickened the ocean floor that now forms this plate, out in the Pacific before it moved between the Americas.
2.8 million years ago
Land rose to close the seaway between the Americas, cutting the Caribbean Sea off from the Pacific.

Sources: Sinton et al. 1998, Earth and Planetary Science Letters 155:221 · O'Dea et al. 2016, Science Advances 2:e1600883

Technical notes

The file

90,022bytes, 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.

The work

Live

One HTML file that drifts with your clock, a few centimetres a year.