Mariana, Plates, Kenny Lienhard

The Plate in detail

Mariana, seed 394

Plate 30 of 52 · one of one

Traits

Palette: Rhyolite
Structure: Fold train
Event: Unconformity
Faults: None
Scale: Standard
Hang: Level
Accent: Single
Heading: North-northwest, 331.7°
Speed: 1.49 cm a year

History

The past. At the ice age peak the sea stood more than 120 metres lower, and the Mariana Islands were about half as large again as today, Guam a quarter larger and Saipan about twice its size, yet no two of the main islands ever joined. The rising sea took that land back, mostly between about 16,000 and 7,000 years ago. People first reached the islands some 3,200 to 3,500 years ago, across more than 2,000 kilometres of open ocean, and by about 2,400 years ago their fires had turned the upland forests of southern Guam into the savanna seen today.

6 million years ago: The Mariana Trough began to open behind the arc, splitting this plate from the Philippine Sea plate.

Sources: Lambeck et al. 2014, PNAS 111:15296; Norder et al. 2018, Global Ecology and Biogeography 27:500; Rieth and Athens 2019, Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology 14:5; Pugach et al. 2021, PNAS 118:e2022112118; Athens and Ward 2004, Records of the Australian Museum Supplement 29:15 · Taylor 1992, Proceedings ODP Scientific Results 126:627-651

Onchain

The file

94,072bytes, the whole work

74,112bytes of code that draws it

3,999bytes 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: Mariana, a micro plate in Bird’s PB2002 model: 420,799 km², 100% ocean
Its motion: A pole at 14.74°N 139.57°E turning 1.197° per million years; at its centre 1.5 cm a year, heading north-northwest
What covers it: deep ocean 60%, slope and ridge 27%, ocean trench 12%, shelf sea under 1%, and three more
Its past: Its account of the last 30,000 years, with its source
Deep history: One dated events, the oldest 6.0 million years ago, each with its source
Its outline: 75 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.

Mariana

Finished