North Andes

Kenny Lienhard, Plates, 2026

Palette: Rhyolite, from ocean
Structure: Domino faults
Drift: 1.1 cm a year, north

971,802 km², a micro plate

The Plate in detail

North Andes, seed 749

Plate 21 of 52 · one of one

Traits

Palette: Rhyolite
Structure: Domino faults
Event: Boudins
Faults: Two
Scale: Standard
Hang: Level
Accent: Repeated
Heading: North, 6.8°
Speed: 1.14 cm a year

History

24 million years ago: The Panama arc began to collide with the northwest corner of South America.
15 million years ago: This block began to slip northeast along the Andes, pushed by the slanting approach of the Nazca plate.

Sources: Farris et al. 2011, Geology 39:1007 · Alvarado et al. 2016, Tectonics 35:1048

Technical notes

The file

90,025bytes, 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.