Okhotsk, Plates, Kenny Lienhard

The Plate in detail

Okhotsk, seed 223

Plate 15 of 52 · one of one

Traits

Palette: Kaolin
Structure: Anticline
Event: None
Faults: One
Scale: Bold
Hang: Level
Accent: Repeated
Era: Land bridge
Heading: Southeast, 144.3°
Speed: 2.52 cm a year

History

The past. With the sea about 120 metres lower, more than 400,000 square kilometres of today’s shallow seas on this plate were dry land, about a fifth of its sea. Hokkaido and Sakhalin were one land joined to Asia, mammoths lived on Hokkaido, and a wide plain ran along the north shore from Magadan to Kamchatka. Honshu stayed an island. The land was already dry when the timeline begins; the rising sea drowned most of it between 16,576 and 8,276 years ago. The lines that stand for the sea turn to the colour of land, all at once, and only across those spans.

19.5 million years ago: The Sea of Japan opened, carrying northeast Japan, now on this plate, away from mainland Asia.

Sources: Lambeck et al. 2014, PNAS 111:15296; Lo et al. 2018, Earth and Planetary Science Letters 488:36; Nakazawa et al. 2011, Quaternary International 242:416; Kawamura 2007, The Quaternary Research 46:171 · Jolivet, Tamaki and Fournier 1994, Journal of Geophysical Research 99:22237 · ICS International Chronostratigraphic Chart v2024/12 (Cohen et al. 2013, updated), stratigraphy.org

Onchain

The file

95,670bytes, the whole work

74,112bytes of code that draws it

5,596bytes 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: Okhotsk, a minor plate in Bird’s PB2002 model: 3,037,109 km², 73% ocean
Its motion: A pole at 30.21°N 98.42°W turning 0.231° per million years; at its centre 2.5 cm a year, heading southeast
What covers it: slope and ridge 40%, shelf sea 22%, boreal forest 12%, deep ocean 10%, and eleven more
Its past: Land bridge, between 30,100 and 8,276 years ago, with its account and source
Deep history: One dated events, the oldest 20 million 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.

Okhotsk

Finished