Galapagos, Plates, Kenny Lienhard

The Plate in detail

Galapagos, seed 519

Plate 51 of 52 · one of one

Traits

Palette: Obsidian
Structure: Graben
Event: None
Faults: Two
Scale: Standard
Hang: Level
Accent: Repeated
Heading: East-northeast, 59.8°
Speed: 5.92 cm a year

History

The past. The Galapagos microplate is deep seafloor, 2 to 5 kilometres down and about 1,000 kilometres west of the Galapagos Islands, which sit on the Nazca plate. The ice age sea, more than 120 metres lower, never came near its floor, and no ice ever reached it. What changed was the water above it: at the ice age peak the surface was about 1.5 to 4 °C colder than today, and it warmed back mostly between about 17,000 and 7,000 years ago.

1.4 million years ago: This tiny microplate formed where the Pacific, Cocos and Nazca plates meet, and began to spin.

Sources: Lambeck et al. 2014, PNAS 111:15296; Lhardy et al. 2021, Climate of the Past 17:1139; Méheust et al. 2018, arktos 4:1; Tierney et al. 2020, Nature 584:569; Osman et al. 2021, Nature 599:239 · Smith et al. 2013, Earth and Planetary Science Letters 371:6 · Lonsdale 1988, Journal of Geophysical Research 93:13551

Onchain

The file

93,403bytes, the whole work

74,112bytes of code that draws it

3,327bytes 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: Galapagos, a micro plate in Bird’s PB2002 model: 14,625 km², 100% ocean
Its motion: A pole at 2.95°N 81.13°E turning 5.471° per million years; at its centre 5.9 cm a year, heading east-northeast
What covers it: deep ocean 90%, slope and ridge 10%
Its past: Its account of the last 30,000 years, with its source
Deep history: One dated events, the oldest 1.4 million years ago, each with its source
Its outline: 50 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.

Galapagos

Finished