Plates Kenny Lienhard
Plates

Plate 38 of 52

Juan de Fuca

Kenny Lienhard, Plates, 2026

Palette
Serpentine
Structure
Graben
Drift
2.1 cm a year, east-northeast
256,323 km², a micro plate

How it is made

Finished

The Plate in detail

Juan de Fuca, seed 90

Plate 38 of 52 · one of one

Traits

Palette
Serpentine
Structure
Graben
Event
None
Faults
Two
Scale
Standard
Hang
Level
Accent
Repeated
Heading
East-northeast, 73.1°
Speed
2.10 cm a year

History

54 million years ago
The northern part of the Farallon plate broke away as a separate plate, the ancestor of this one.
7.4 million years ago
The oldest ocean floor on this plate, now near its sinking edge, formed.

Sources: Rosa and Molnar 1988, Journal of Geophysical Research 93:2997 · Seton et al. 2020, age grid v2020.1 processed here, Geochemistry Geophysics Geosystems

Technical notes

The file

90,036bytes, the whole work
74,112bytes of engine, gzip and base64
0network requests
2048 pxdrawn on up to 8 workers, at your screen’s size

One HTML file: the engine (151,144 bytes minified), this plate's data and a small loader. It reads your clock and slides the view to where the plate is today.

engine sha256 a7fbc03acc0fc9ba343881bb88ddaf2b7564564d8bc9cbed16e75e47e01fb3f2

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.

The work

Live

One HTML file that drifts with your clock, a few centimetres a year.