Plates Kenny Lienhard
Plates

Plate 1 of 52

Pacific

Kenny Lienhard, Plates, 2026

Palette
Lapis, from ocean
Structure
Fold train
Drift
7.2 cm a year, west-northwest
104,593,741 km², a major plate

How it is made

Finished

The Plate in detail

Pacific, seed 1

Plate 1 of 52 · one of one

Traits

Palette
Lapis
Structure
Fold train
Event
Unconformity
Faults
None
Scale
Standard
Hang
Level
Accent
Single
Heading
West-northwest, 296.7°
Speed
7.20 cm a year

History

190 million years ago
The Pacific plate was born as a tiny plate where three older ocean plates met.
189.5 million years ago
The oldest ocean floor still on this plate formed.
121.3 million years ago
Huge outpourings of lava began to build Ontong Java, the largest ocean plateau on Earth.
47 million years ago
The plate changed its direction of travel, putting the sharp bend in the Hawaiian-Emperor chain of volcanoes.
30 million years ago
This plate first reached North America, and the San Andreas fault system began to grow.
6.3 million years ago
The Gulf of California began to open as Baja California started to travel with this plate.

Sources: Boschman and van Hinsbergen 2016, Science Advances 2:e1600022 · ICS International Chronostratigraphic Chart v2024/12 (Cohen et al. 2013, updated), stratigraphy.org · Seton et al. 2020, age grid v2020.1 processed here, Geochemistry Geophysics Geosystems · Tejada et al. 1996, Journal of Petrology 37:361 · Torsvik et al. 2017, Nature Communications 8:15660 · Sharp and Clague 2006, Science 313:1281 · Atwater 1970, GSA Bulletin 81:3513 · Oskin and Stock 2003, Geology 31:23

Technical notes

The file

90,011bytes, 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.

The work

Live

One HTML file that drifts with your clock, a few centimetres a year.