North Bismarck, Plates, Kenny Lienhard

The Plate in detail

North Bismarck, seed 84

Plate 32 of 52 · one of one

Traits

Palette: Serpentine
Structure: Fold train
Event: None
Faults: One
Scale: Standard
Hang: Level
Accent: Double
Heading: West-northwest, 293.1°
Speed: 6.99 cm a year

History

The past. At the ice age peak the sea stood about 120 metres lower: New Hanover was joined to New Ireland, and Manus more than doubled in size, yet only about 6,000 square kilometres, under 2 percent of this plate’s sea, became land, and Manus stayed more than 200 kilometres from New Guinea and New Ireland. The sea surface was about 3 degrees cooler than today and had warmed to within a degree of it by about 13,000 years ago, while the rainforest of New Ireland changed little. People had lived on New Ireland since about 42,000 years ago, and about 20,000 years ago they brought the cuscus over from New Guinea.

3.5 million years ago: The floor of the Bismarck Sea began to spread apart along this plate's southern edge.

Sources: Lambeck et al. 2014, PNAS 111:15296; Tachikawa 2024, PANGAEA 965889; Kerby et al. 2022, World Archaeology 54:317; Leavesley 2005, Asian Perspectives 44:207 · Taylor 1979, Geology 7:171

Onchain

The file

95,027bytes, the whole work

74,112bytes of code that draws it

4,928bytes 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 Bismarck, a micro plate in Bird’s PB2002 model: 388,137 km², 97% ocean
Its motion: A pole at 45.19°S 124.30°E turning 0.849° per million years; at its centre 7.0 cm a year, heading west-northwest
What covers it: slope and ridge 82%, deep ocean 12%, rainforest 3%, shelf sea 3%, and six more
Its past: Its account of the last 30,000 years, with its source
Deep history: One dated events, the oldest 3.5 million years ago, each with its source
Its outline: 131 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 Bismarck

Finished