New Hebrides

Kenny Lienhard, Plates, 2026

Palette: Azurite, from ocean
Structure: Fold train
Drift: 8.4 cm a year, west-northwest

643,461 km², a micro plate

The Plate in detail

New Hebrides, seed 128

Plate 24 of 52 · one of one

Traits

Palette: Azurite
Structure: Fold train
Event: None
Faults: One
Scale: Standard
Hang: Level
Accent: Single
Heading: West-northwest, 281.3°
Speed: 8.39 cm a year

History

12 million years ago: The North Fiji Basin began to open behind this plate's volcanic arc.
10 million years ago: Subduction here flipped direction, and the Australian plate began to sink beneath this arc.

Sources: Crameri et al. 2020, Nature Communications 11:3750 · Schellart, Lister and Toy 2006, Earth-Science Reviews 76:191

Technical notes

The file

90,033bytes, 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.