India, Plates, Kenny Lienhard

The Plate in detail

India, seed 114

Plate 10 of 52 · one of one

Traits

Palette: Citrine
Structure: Monocline
Event: Unconformity
Faults: None
Scale: Standard
Hang: Level
Accent: Single
Era: Low seas
Heading: Northeast, 43.5°
Speed: 5.68 cm a year

History

The past. With the sea about 120 metres lower, about 550,000 square kilometres of today’s shallow seas around India were dry land, half of it the wide shelf off the west coast from the Indus to Kerala. Sri Lanka was joined to India, and the atolls of the Maldives and the Chagos Bank stood dry. The land was already dry when the timeline begins; the rising sea drowned most of it between 14,366 and 7,226 years ago, and cut Sri Lanka off about 7,000 years ago. The lines that stand for the shallow seas turn halfway to the colour of land, all at once, and only across those spans.

3.5 billion years ago: The ancient core of India began to form.
136 million years ago: A new ocean ridge began to split India away from Australia and Antarctica.
87.6 million years ago: India broke away from Madagascar as hot mantle rose beneath them.
66.2 million years ago: Vast lava floods, the Deccan Traps, erupted around the time of the mass extinction that ended the age of dinosaurs.
59 million years ago: India began to collide with Asia, starting the rise of the Himalaya.

Sources: Lambeck et al. 2014, PNAS 111:15296; Dubey et al. 2023, Quaternary Research 111:166; Kench et al. 2009, Geology 37:455 · Mishra et al. 1999, Precambrian Research 93:139 · Chaudhuri et al. 2018, Scientific Reports 8:7069 · Gibbons, Whittaker and Muller 2013, Journal of Geophysical Research 118:808 · Storey et al. 1995, Science 267:852 · Schoene et al. 2015, Science 347:182 · ICS International Chronostratigraphic Chart v2024/12 (Cohen et al. 2013, updated), stratigraphy.org · Hu et al. 2016, Earth-Science Reviews 160:264

Onchain

The file

96,331bytes, the whole work

74,112bytes of code that draws it

6,267bytes 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: India, a minor plate in Bird’s PB2002 model: 12,435,054 km², 69% ocean
Its motion: A pole at 45.06°N 0.52°E turning 0.538° per million years; at its centre 5.7 cm a year, heading northeast
What covers it: deep ocean 48%, cropland 20%, slope and ridge 17%, shelf sea 5%, and seven more
Its past: Low seas, between 30,100 and 7,226 years ago, with its account and source
Deep history: Five dated events, the oldest 3.5 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.

India

Finished