Pacific, Plates, Kenny Lienhard

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

The past. The Pacific barely changed in 30,000 years. At the ice age peak the sea stood more than 100 metres lower and winter sea ice spread over the plate’s southern edge, but together they touched about 2 percent of it.

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: Lambeck et al. 2014, PNAS 111:15296; Benz et al. 2016, Quaternary Science Reviews 146:216; Lhardy et al. 2021, Climate of the Past 17:1139 · 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

Onchain

The file

96,613bytes, the whole work

74,112bytes of code that draws it

6,548bytes 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: Pacific, a major plate in Bird’s PB2002 model: 104,593,741 km², 100% ocean
Its motion: A pole at 63.23°S 107.69°E turning 0.649° per million years; at its centre 7.2 cm a year, heading west-northwest
What covers it: deep ocean 91%, slope and ridge 7%, ocean trench 2%, shelf sea under 1%, and nine more
Its past: Its account of the last 30,000 years, with its source
Deep history: Six dated events, the oldest 190 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.

Pacific

Finished