Shetland, Plates, Kenny Lienhard

The Plate in detail

Shetland, seed 621

Plate 49 of 52 · one of one

Traits

Palette: Obsidian
Structure: Anticline
Event: None
Faults: One
Scale: Standard
Hang: Level
Accent: Repeated
Era: Last ice age
Heading: North-northeast, 31.3°
Speed: 2.23 cm a year

History

The past. The last ice age: the South Shetland Islands lay under an ice cap of their own, grounded across their shelf about 50 kilometres north of today’s coast and south to the edge of the deep Bransfield Basin, where floating ice took over. About half of today’s open sea on the plate lay under ice. The ice was probably already there when the timeline begins; it melted back from roughly 20,076 years ago until about 10,176, when the last floating ice in Maxwell Bay and the Bransfield Basin gave way to open water. The lines that stand for the open sea turn the colour of ice, all at once, and only across those spans.

3.3 million years ago: The ocean ridge feeding the old plate that sinks beneath this plate stopped spreading.

Sources: Ó Cofaigh et al. 2014, Quaternary Science Reviews 100:87; Bentley et al. 2014, Quaternary Science Reviews 100:1; Lavoie et al. 2015, The Cryosphere 9:613; Milliken et al. 2009, GSA Bulletin 121:1711 · Livermore et al. 2000, Geology 28:607

Onchain

The file

93,295bytes, the whole work

74,112bytes of code that draws it

3,221bytes 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: Shetland, a micro plate in Bird’s PB2002 model: 72,266 km², 95% ocean
Its motion: A pole at 46.81°N 142.32°W turning 0.252° per million years; at its centre 2.2 cm a year, heading north-northeast
What covers it: slope and ridge 60%, deep ocean 19%, shelf sea 16%, ice 5%
Its past: Last ice age, between 30,100 and 10,176 years ago, with its account and source
Deep history: One dated events, the oldest 3.3 million years ago, each with its source
Its outline: 24 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.

Shetland

Finished