Conway Reef, Plates, Kenny Lienhard

The Plate in detail

Conway Reef, seed 355

Plate 43 of 52 · one of one

Traits

Palette: Opal
Structure: Fold train
Event: Unconformity
Faults: One
Scale: Standard
Hang: Level
Accent: Repeated
Heading: North-northwest, 338.6°
Speed: 2.94 cm a year

History

The past. Conway Reef is open ocean, mostly two to three kilometres deep, and the ice age barely touched it. About 20,000 years ago the sea stood more than 100 metres lower, and the reef that gives the plate its name stood dry as a small limestone island until the rising sea drowned it again as the ice sheets melted. The water was a degree or more cooler, and the nearest sea ice lay about 4,000 kilometres to the south.

12 million years ago: The North Fiji Basin, where this small plate lies, began to open.

Sources: Lambeck et al. 2014, PNAS 111:15296; Dickinson 2009, GSA Today 19:4; Paul et al. 2021, Climate of the Past 17:805; Tierney et al. 2020, Nature 584:569; Lhardy et al. 2021, Climate of the Past 17:1139; Bird 2003, Geochemistry Geophysics Geosystems 4:1027; ETOPO 2022, NOAA NCEI · Crameri et al. 2020, Nature Communications 11:3750 · Schellart, Lister and Toy 2006, Earth-Science Reviews 76:191

Onchain

The file

93,834bytes, the whole work

74,112bytes of code that draws it

3,757bytes 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: Conway Reef, a micro plate in Bird’s PB2002 model: 144,456 km², 100% ocean
Its motion: A pole at 20.59°S 170.87°E turning 3.888° per million years; at its centre 2.9 cm a year, heading north-northwest
What covers it: slope and ridge 68%, deep ocean 32%, shelf sea under 1%
Its past: Its account of the last 30,000 years, with its source
Deep history: One dated events, the oldest 12 million years ago, each with its source
Its outline: 65 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.

Conway Reef

Finished