Panama, Plates, Kenny Lienhard

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
Era: The wide isthmus
Heading: Northeast, 41.9°
Speed: 1.93 cm a year

History

The past. With the sea about 120 metres lower, more than a third of this plate’s sea was dry land, and more of the plate was land than sea. The Gulf of Panama was a wide plain where the Pearl Islands stood as hills, Coiba was joined to the coast, and near the canal the isthmus was about three times as wide as today. The land was already dry when the timeline begins; the rising sea drowned most of it between 14,536 and 8,056 years ago. The lines that stand for the sea turn to the colour of land, all at once, and only across those spans.

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: Lambeck et al. 2014, PNAS 111:15296; Golik 1968, Journal of Geology 76:497; Martinez-Polanco et al. 2022, Journal of Archaeological Science 143:105613 · Farris et al. 2011, Geology 39:1007 · O'Dea et al. 2016, Science Advances 2:e1600883

Onchain

The file

94,660bytes, the whole work

74,112bytes of code that draws it

4,586bytes 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: Panama, a micro plate in Bird’s PB2002 model: 273,735 km², 59% ocean
Its motion: A pole at 29.84°N 109.75°W turning 0.311° per million years; at its centre 1.9 cm a year, heading northeast
What covers it: slope and ridge 31%, shelf sea 24%, rainforest 24%, grassland 7%, and nine more
Its past: The wide isthmus, between 30,100 and 8,056 years ago, with its account and source
Deep history: Two dated events, the oldest 24 million years ago, each with its source
Its outline: 98 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.

Panama

Finished