Solomon Sea, Plates, Kenny Lienhard

The Plate in detail

Solomon Sea, seed 304

Plate 44 of 52 · one of one

Traits

Palette: Obsidian
Structure: Graben
Event: Unconformity
Faults: Two
Scale: Standard
Hang: Level
Accent: Repeated
Heading: North, 9.9°
Speed: 7.06 cm a year

History

The past. The Solomon Sea is deep ocean, typically almost 5 kilometres deep and nearly 9 in the trench on its northeast edge, and its shallowest floor lies 426 metres down, so when the ice age sea stood about 120 metres lower none of it became land; the new coasts lay on the islands around it. Mud cored at the sea’s southern edge shows the surface water about 3 degrees cooler than today until about 18,600 years ago, then warming in steps to today’s warmth by about 11,000 years ago. No ice reached these waters and the plate has no land, so its colours stay the same through the whole timeline.

34 million years ago: The ocean floor of this small plate formed at a spreading ridge; studies disagree on the exact age.

Sources: Lambeck et al. 2014, PNAS 111:15296; Lo et al. 2014, Climate of the Past 10:2253; Lo et al. 2022, Quaternary Science Reviews 295:107756; Green et al. 2022, Climate of the Past 18:845 · Joshima et al. 1986, Geo-Marine Letters 6:229 · Seton et al. 2020, age grid v2020.1 processed here, Geochemistry Geophysics Geosystems

Onchain

The file

93,454bytes, the whole work

74,112bytes of code that draws it

3,373bytes 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: Solomon Sea, a micro plate in Bird’s PB2002 model: 128,668 km², 100% ocean
Its motion: A pole at 2.95°S 130.38°E turning 1.660° per million years; at its centre 7.1 cm a year, heading north
What covers it: deep ocean 79%, ocean trench 19%, slope and ridge 2%
Its past: Its account of the last 30,000 years, with its source
Deep history: One dated events, the oldest 34 million years ago, each with its source
Its outline: 40 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.

Solomon Sea

Finished