South America, Plates, Kenny Lienhard

The Plate in detail

South America, seed 59

Plate 7 of 52 · one of one

Traits

Palette: Malachite
Structure: Nappe
Event: None
Faults: None
Scale: Standard
Hang: Level
Accent: Double
Era: Low seas
Heading: North-northwest, 335.4°
Speed: 1.27 cm a year

History

The past. With the sea about 120 metres lower, about 1.7 million square kilometres of today’s shallow seas around South America were dry land, the largest part of it the wide plain off Argentina, where the Falklands grew to more than three times their size but stayed an island. The land was already dry when the timeline begins; the rising sea drowned most of it between 15,777 and 8,051 years ago. The lines that stand for the sea turn halfway to the colour of land, all at once, and only across those spans.

3.6 billion years ago: Some of the oldest known rocks in South America formed, in what is now eastern Brazil.
134.6 million years ago: Huge lava floods covered much of what is now southern Brazil while the South Atlantic rift was growing.
113 million years ago: South America and Africa broke apart and the South Atlantic Ocean opened, after a long rift.
50 million years ago: South America began to pull away faster from Antarctica, starting to open the Drake Passage.
2.8 million years ago: Land rose to close the seaway between the Americas, joining South America to North America.

Sources: Lambeck et al. 2014, PNAS 111:15296; Davies et al. 2020, Earth-Science Reviews 204:103152; Austin et al. 2013, Nature Communications 4:1552 · Moreira et al. 2022, Geoscience Frontiers 13:101366 · Thiede and Vasconcelos 2010, Geology 38:747 · Heine, Zoethout and Muller 2013, Solid Earth 4:215 · Livermore et al. 2005, Earth and Planetary Science Letters 236:459 · Eagles and Jokat 2014, Tectonophysics 611:28 · O'Dea et al. 2016, Science Advances 2:e1600883

Onchain

The file

96,768bytes, the whole work

74,112bytes of code that draws it

6,675bytes 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: South America, a major plate in Bird’s PB2002 model: 41,825,049 km², 61% ocean
Its motion: A pole at 28.86°S 125.82°W turning 0.121° per million years; at its centre 1.3 cm a year, heading north-northwest
What covers it: deep ocean 48%, rainforest 15%, grassland 9%, slope and ridge 7%, and twelve more
Its past: Low seas, between 30,100 and 8,051 years ago, with its account and source
Deep history: Five dated events, the oldest 3.6 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.

South America

Finished