Molucca Sea, Plates, Kenny Lienhard

The Plate in detail

Molucca Sea, seed 1071

Plate 31 of 52 · one of one

Traits

Palette: Serpentine
Structure: Monocline
Event: None
Faults: One
Scale: Bold
Hang: Level
Accent: Double
Era: Low seas
Heading: East-northeast, 64.0°
Speed: 1.62 cm a year

History

The past. With the sea about 120 metres lower, about 25,000 square kilometres of this plate’s shallow seas, about 7 percent of its sea, were dry land. At the ice age peak Peleng, Banggai, Taliabu, Mangole and Sanana were one island, more than twice their size today, but it never reached Sulawesi, and Sulawesi and Buru stayed islands across deep water. The land was already dry when the timeline begins; the rising sea drowned most of it between 15,466 and 7,336 years ago. The line that stands for the shallow sea turns about halfway to the colour of land, all at once, and only across those spans.

15 million years ago: This small plate began to sink on its eastern side as well as its western side, so it is now being swallowed from both sides.

Sources: Lambeck et al. 2014, PNAS 111:15296; Rheindt et al. 2020, Science 367:167; Ericson et al. 2019, BMC Evolutionary Biology 19:151; Pujolar et al. 2022, Nature Communications 13:268 · Crameri et al. 2020, Nature Communications 11:3750

Onchain

The file

93,701bytes, the whole work

74,112bytes of code that draws it

3,611bytes 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: Molucca Sea, a micro plate in Bird’s PB2002 model: 418,107 km², 83% ocean
Its motion: A pole at 3.15°N 55.54°W turning 3.719° per million years; at its centre 1.6 cm a year, heading east-northeast
What covers it: slope and ridge 40%, deep ocean 34%, rainforest 12%, shelf sea 9%, and six more
Its past: Low seas, between 30,100 and 7,336 years ago, with its account and source
Deep history: One dated events, the oldest 15 million years ago, each with its source
Its outline: 41 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.

Molucca Sea

Finished