Niuafo'ou, Plates, Kenny Lienhard

The Plate in detail

Niuafo'ou, seed 97

Plate 45 of 52 · one of one

Traits

Palette: Opal
Structure: Domino faults
Event: None
Faults: Two
Scale: Standard
Hang: Level
Accent: Single
Heading: East, 97.4°
Speed: 8.51 cm a year

History

The past. The Niuafo’ou plate is open sea, mostly 1.8 to 2.7 kilometres deep, so the ice age barely touched it: the glacial sea ice stayed about 4,500 kilometres to the south. With the sea up to 134 metres lower, a thin rim around Niuafo’ou island and a shoal 115 kilometres to its west stood dry, about 15 to 35 square kilometres in all. On the island, stromatolites in the crater lakes date back about 15,000 radiocarbon years, and the volcano has erupted at least 11 times since 1800, emptying the island in 1946.

5.5 million years ago: The Lau Basin, where this microplate lies, began to open.

Sources: Lhardy et al. 2021, Climate of the Past 17:1139; Lambeck et al. 2014, PNAS 111:15296; Kremer et al. 2012, Astrobiology 12:535; Taylor 1995, Journal of the Polynesian Society 104:323; Ryan et al. 2009, Geochemistry Geophysics Geosystems 10:Q03014; ETOPO 2022, NOAA NCEI · Ruellan et al. 2003, Geochemistry Geophysics Geosystems 4

Onchain

The file

94,221bytes, the whole work

74,112bytes of code that draws it

4,154bytes 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: Niuafo'ou, a micro plate in Bird’s PB2002 model: 124,282 km², 100% ocean
Its motion: A pole at 3.32°S 173.95°W turning 3.283° per million years; at its centre 8.5 cm a year, heading east
What covers it: slope and ridge 96%, deep ocean 4%, ocean trench under 1%, rainforest 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 5.5 million years ago, each with its source
Its outline: 80 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.

Niuafo'ou

Finished