Rivera, Plates, Kenny Lienhard

The Plate in detail

Rivera, seed 359

Plate 47 of 52 · one of one

Traits

Palette: Obsidian
Structure: Anticline
Event: None
Faults: One
Scale: Standard
Hang: Level
Accent: Repeated
Heading: East, 84.9°
Speed: 0.92 cm a year

History

The past. The Rivera plate is all deep sea, about 1,500 to 5,800 metres down, so when the ice age sea stood more than 120 metres lower none of it became land, and its water stayed far too warm for sea ice. At the ice age peak, about 20,000 years ago, the surface sea here was about 4 degrees colder than today, near 23 degrees against 27, and it began to warm about 17,000 years ago. Along the Mexican coast just north of it, upwelling and plankton were weaker in the cold.

10 million years ago: The Rivera plate was already moving on its own, apart from the Cocos plate.
9.7 million years ago: The oldest ocean floor on this plate formed.

Sources: ETOPO 2022; Lambeck et al. 2014, PNAS 111:15296; Osman et al. 2021, Nature 599:239; Ganeshram and Pedersen 1998, Paleoceanography 13:634 · DeMets and Traylen 2000, Tectonophysics 318:119 · Seton et al. 2020, age grid v2020.1 processed here, Geochemistry Geophysics Geosystems

Onchain

The file

93,852bytes, the whole work

74,112bytes of code that draws it

3,787bytes 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: Rivera, a micro plate in Bird’s PB2002 model: 100,892 km², 100% ocean
Its motion: A pole at 21.16°N 107.50°W turning 4.235° per million years; at its centre 0.9 cm a year, heading east
What covers it: deep ocean 65%, slope and ridge 35%
Its past: Its account of the last 30,000 years, with its source
Deep history: Two dated events, the oldest 10 million years ago, each with its source
Its outline: 67 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.

Rivera

Finished