North America, Plates, Kenny Lienhard

The Plate in detail

North America, seed 108

Plate 4 of 52 · one of one

Traits

Palette: Kaolin
Structure: Thrust
Event: None
Faults: One
Scale: Standard
Hang: Diagonal
Accent: Repeated
Era: Last ice age
Heading: West, 270.5°
Speed: 2.04 cm a year

History

The past. The last ice age: the ice sheets of North America and Greenland were already growing when the timeline begins. They held their peak from 26,576 to 19,076 years ago, when ice covered about half of the plate’s land, then melted back until 6,876 years ago, when little more than today’s ice was left. The sea stood more than 100 metres lower, and a land bridge joined Alaska to Asia until about 11,000 years ago. Only the lines that stand for the ice change colour, all at once, and only across those spans.

4 billion years ago: Rocks among the oldest known on Earth formed, now found in northern Canada.
1.8 billion years ago: Older continental blocks collided and welded together into the core of North America.
201.5 million years ago: Huge lava floods erupted as Pangaea began to break apart, at the time of the end-Triassic mass extinction.
55.5 million years ago: Greenland, which rides on this plate, split from Europe and the northeast Atlantic Ocean began to open.
30 million years ago: The Pacific plate first reached this plate's western edge, and the San Andreas fault system began to grow.
6.3 million years ago: The Gulf of California began to open, and Baja California moved over to the Pacific plate.

Sources: Clark et al. 2009, Science 325:710; Dalton et al. 2020, Quaternary Science Reviews 234:106223 · Bowring and Williams 1999, Contributions to Mineralogy and Petrology 134:3 · Hoffman 1988, Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 16:543 · Blackburn et al. 2013, Science 340:941 · Storey, Duncan and Swisher 2007, Science 316:587 · Atwater 1970, GSA Bulletin 81:3513 · Oskin and Stock 2003, Geology 31:23

Onchain

The file

97,189bytes, the whole work

74,112bytes of code that draws it

6,742bytes 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: North America, a major plate in Bird’s PB2002 model: 55,431,427 km², 54% ocean
Its motion: A pole at 4.75°S 86.52°W turning 0.206° per million years; at its centre 2.0 cm a year, heading west
What covers it: deep ocean 22%, shelf sea 12%, slope and ridge 12%, boreal forest 9%, and 13 more
Its past: Last ice age, between 33,076 and 6,876 years ago, with its account and source
Deep history: Six dated events, the oldest 4.0 billion years ago, each with its source
Its outline: 150 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.

North America

Finished