Eurasia, Plates, Kenny Lienhard

The Plate in detail

Eurasia, seed 213

Plate 5 of 52 · one of one

Traits

Palette: Citrine
Structure: Graben
Event: Unconformity
Faults: Two
Scale: Standard
Hang: Level
Accent: Double
Era: Last ice age
Heading: East, 84.2°
Speed: 2.40 cm a year

History

The past. The last ice age: ice sheets spread over Scandinavia, Britain and Ireland, and the Barents and Kara seas, about an eighth of this plate. They were still growing when the timeline begins, stood at their largest from 22,076 to 20,076 years ago, and were almost gone by 10,076 years ago. Only the violet beds turn to ice, all at once, and only across those spans.

3.8 billion years ago: Some of Earth's oldest crust, at least 3.8 billion years old, formed in what is now northern China.
251.9 million years ago: Vast lava floods poured out across Siberia at the time of the most severe mass extinction of the last half billion years.
59 million years ago: India began to collide with Asia, starting the rise of the Himalaya and Tibet.
55.5 million years ago: Europe and Greenland split apart and the northeast Atlantic Ocean began to open.
27.5 million years ago: Arabia began to collide with Eurasia, raising the Zagros mountains.

Sources: Hughes et al. 2016, Boreas 45:1; Clark et al. 2009, Science 325:710 · Liu et al. 1992, Geology 20:339 · Burgess and Bowring 2015, Science Advances 1:e1500470 · ICS International Chronostratigraphic Chart v2024/12 (Cohen et al. 2013, updated), stratigraphy.org · Hu et al. 2016, Earth-Science Reviews 160:264 · Storey, Duncan and Swisher 2007, Science 316:587 · McQuarrie and van Hinsbergen 2013, Geology 41:315

Onchain

The file

96,650bytes, the whole work

74,112bytes of code that draws it

6,218bytes 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: Eurasia, a major plate in Bird’s PB2002 model: 48,557,789 km², 28% ocean
Its motion: A pole at 49.32°N 113.28°W turning 0.227° per million years; at its centre 2.4 cm a year, heading east
What covers it: boreal forest 15%, cropland 14%, desert 12%, slope and ridge 11%, and twelve more
Its past: Last ice age, between 33,076 and 10,076 years ago, with its account and source
Deep history: Five dated events, the oldest 3.8 billion years ago, each with its source
Its outline: 150 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.

Eurasia

Finished