Somalia, Plates, Kenny Lienhard

The Plate in detail

Somalia, seed 580

Plate 8 of 52 · one of one

Traits

Palette: Oxide
Structure: Graben
Event: Unconformity
Faults: Two
Scale: Standard
Hang: Level
Accent: Single
Era: African Humid Period
Heading: East-northeast, 57.0°
Speed: 2.79 cm a year

History

The past. The African Humid Period: the monsoon rains came back to the Horn of Africa 11,676 to 10,076 years ago. Lakes rose along the rift, Lake Turkana stood about 90 metres higher and spilled toward the Nile, and grass spread over parts of the Horn’s deserts. The rains faded 5,676 to 4,076 years ago, and the desert came back. Earlier, at the ice age peak, the sea stood about 120 metres lower and the Seychelles Bank was one island of about 38,000 square kilometres. Only the desert beds turn to grass, all at once, and only inside those windows.

3.7 billion years ago: Some of the oldest rocks in Africa formed; they now lie within this plate's boundary as mapped.
3.3 billion years ago: Some of the oldest rocks on this plate formed, now in northeast Madagascar.
183 million years ago: Rifting and vast lava floods began to split Africa from Antarctica and Madagascar.
167.5 million years ago: Madagascar, with India and Antarctica, began to pull away from Africa as new ocean floor formed.
87.6 million years ago: India broke away from Madagascar, which stayed with Africa.
30.4 million years ago: Rifting began in the north of the East African Rift, the first step in splitting this plate from the Africa plate.
18.5 million years ago: New ocean floor began to form in the Gulf of Aden, splitting this plate from Arabia.

Sources: Tierney and deMenocal 2013, Science 342:843; Collins et al. 2017, Nature Communications 8:1372; Foerster et al. 2012, Quaternary International 274:25; Mologni et al. 2021, Geomorphology 391:107896; Garcin et al. 2012, Earth and Planetary Science Letters 331-332:322; Nutz and Schuster 2016, Solid Earth 7:1609; Fersi et al. 2016, Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology 233:176; Holmes and Hoelzmann 2017, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science; Lambeck et al. 2014, PNAS 111:15296 · Zeh, Gerdes and Millonig 2011, Journal of the Geological Society 168:953 · Schofield et al. 2010, Precambrian Research 182:187 · Tuck-Martin, Adam and Eagles 2018, Basin Research 30:1118 · Mueller and Jokat 2019, Tectonophysics 750:301 · Storey et al. 1995, Science 267:852 · Macgregor 2015, Journal of African Earth Sciences 101:232 · ICS International Chronostratigraphic Chart v2024/12 (Cohen et al. 2013, updated), stratigraphy.org · Bosworth, Huchon and McClay 2005, Journal of African Earth Sciences 43:334

Onchain

The file

97,618bytes, the whole work

74,112bytes of code that draws it

7,554bytes 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: Somalia, a minor plate in Bird’s PB2002 model: 19,154,737 km², 75% ocean
Its motion: A pole at 49.00°N 93.87°W turning 0.341° per million years; at its centre 2.8 cm a year, heading east-northeast
What covers it: deep ocean 56%, slope and ridge 17%, grassland 8%, forest 6%, and ten more
Its past: African Humid Period, between 11,676 and 4,076 years ago, with its account and source
Deep history: Seven dated events, the oldest 3.7 billion years ago, each with its source
Its outline: 150 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.

Somalia

Finished