Panama

Kenny Lienhard, Plates, 2026

Palette: Serpentine
Structure: Thrust
Drift: 1.9 cm a year, northeast

273,735 km², a micro plate

The Plate in detail

Panama, seed 297

Plate 37 of 52 · one of one

Traits

Palette: Serpentine
Structure: Thrust
Event: None
Faults: One
Scale: Standard
Hang: Level
Accent: Single
Heading: Northeast, 41.9°
Speed: 1.93 cm a year

History

24 million years ago: This arc began to collide with South America.
2.8 million years ago: The Isthmus of Panama closed, joining North and South America by land.

Sources: Farris et al. 2011, Geology 39:1007 · O'Dea et al. 2016, Science Advances 2:e1600883

Technical notes

The file

90,020bytes, 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.