Juan de Fuca, Plates, Kenny Lienhard

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

The past. At the ice age peak the sea here was about 4 to 6 degrees Celsius colder than today, and a little later the Cordilleran ice sheet reached the continental shelf off Vancouver Island, about 40 kilometres from the plate. The plate itself is deep ocean floor, so it never held ice or dry land. Between about 20,000 and 14,000 years ago, dozens of floods from glacial Lake Missoula burst down the Columbia River and ran on as underwater currents along Cascadia Channel, across the plate, leaving sand beds up to 57 metres thick in Escanaba Trough on its southern edge.

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: Paul et al. 2021, Climate of the Past 17:805; Prahl et al. 1995, Paleoceanography 10:763; Gowan et al. 2021, Nature Communications 12:1199; Dalton et al. 2020, Quaternary Science Reviews 234:106223; O’Connor et al. 2020, Earth-Science Reviews 208:103181; Normark and Reid 2003, Journal of Geology 111:617; Reid and Normark 2003, USGS Bulletin 2216; Zuffa et al. 2000, Journal of Geology 108:253 · Rosa and Molnar 1988, Journal of Geophysical Research 93:2997 · Seton et al. 2020, age grid v2020.1 processed here, Geochemistry Geophysics Geosystems

Onchain

The file

95,059bytes, the whole work

74,112bytes of code that draws it

4,969bytes 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: Juan de Fuca, a micro plate in Bird’s PB2002 model: 256,323 km², 100% ocean
Its motion: A pole at 28.09°S 58.31°E turning 0.613° per million years; at its centre 2.1 cm a year, heading east-northeast
What covers it: slope and ridge 85%, deep ocean 15%
Its past: Its account of the last 30,000 years, with its source
Deep history: Three dated events, the oldest 54 million years ago, each with its source
Its outline: 96 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.

Juan de Fuca

Finished