North Andes, Plates, Kenny Lienhard

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
Era: Ice age Andes
Heading: North, 6.8°
Speed: 1.14 cm a year

History

The past. The ice age: with the sea more than 100 metres lower, more than 80,000 square kilometres of today’s shallow seas were dry land, nearly a third of the plate’s sea, the whole Gulf of Venezuela among them. On the mountains the forest stopped about 1,500 metres lower than today, near 2,000 metres, with open páramo grassland above it and glaciers on the highest peaks. Both were there when the timeline begins; the sea drowned the shelf and the forest climbed back between 15,955 and 7,654 years ago. The line that stands for the sea turns to the colour of land and the pale beds turn toward grass, all at once, and only across those spans.

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: Lambeck et al. 2014, PNAS 111:15296; Peltier et al. 2015, Journal of Geophysical Research Solid Earth 120:450; Groot et al. 2011, Climate of the Past 7:299; Flantua et al. 2019, Journal of Biogeography 46:1808; van der Hammen and Hooghiemstra 1995, Quaternary Science Reviews 14:841 · Farris et al. 2011, Geology 39:1007 · Alvarado et al. 2016, Tectonics 35:1048

Onchain

The file

95,745bytes, the whole work

74,112bytes of code that draws it

5,666bytes 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 Andes, a micro plate in Bird’s PB2002 model: 971,802 km², 28% ocean
Its motion: A pole at 9.11°N 133.82°W turning 0.121° per million years; at its centre 1.1 cm a year, heading north
What covers it: rainforest 27%, slope and ridge 15%, grassland 14%, cropland 14%, and eleven more
Its past: Ice age Andes, between 30,100 and 7,654 years ago, with its account and source
Deep history: Two dated events, the oldest 24 million years ago, each with its source
Its outline: 144 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 Andes

Finished