Cocos, Plates, Kenny Lienhard

The Plate in detail

Cocos, seed 17

Plate 17 of 52 · one of one

Traits

Palette: Lapis
Structure: Thrust
Event: None
Faults: One
Scale: Standard
Hang: Level
Accent: Single
Heading: Northeast, 40.5°
Speed: 7.27 cm a year

History

The past. The Cocos plate is almost all deep ocean, and no ice reached it in the last 30,000 years. At the ice age peak, about 20,000 years ago, the sea stood more than 120 metres lower, so Cocos Island, its only land, was about eight times its present size, and the sea surface was about 1.5 to 3 degrees colder than today. The water warmed slowly as the ice sheets melted, and the rising sea drowned most of the island’s shelf between about 16,000 and 10,000 years ago.

24.6 million years ago: The oldest ocean floor on this plate formed, on the older Farallon plate.
23 million years ago: The Farallon plate split in two, and its northern part became this plate.

Sources: Méheust et al. 2018, arktos 4:1; Lhardy et al. 2021, Climate of the Past 17:1139; Orvis and Horn 2000, Quaternary Research 54:24; Lambeck et al. 2014, PNAS 111:15296; Lizano 2001, Revista de Biología Tropical 49 (Suppl. 2):163; Rincón-Martínez and Leduc 2012, PANGAEA; Benway et al. 2006, Paleoceanography 21 · Seton et al. 2020, age grid v2020.1 processed here, Geochemistry Geophysics Geosystems · Lonsdale 2005, Tectonophysics 404:237

Onchain

The file

95,337bytes, the whole work

74,112bytes of code that draws it

5,281bytes 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: Cocos, a minor plate in Bird’s PB2002 model: 2,931,798 km², 100% ocean
Its motion: A pole at 24.20°N 115.87°W turning 1.507° per million years; at its centre 7.3 cm a year, heading northeast
What covers it: deep ocean 78%, slope and ridge 22%, ocean trench under 1%, shelf sea under 1%
Its past: Its account of the last 30,000 years, with its source
Deep history: Two dated events, the oldest 25 million years ago, each with its source
Its outline: 147 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.

Cocos

Finished