Plates Kenny Lienhard
Plates

Plate 7 of 52

South America

Kenny Lienhard, Plates, 2026

Palette
Malachite, from rainforest
Structure
Nappe
Drift
1.3 cm a year, north-northwest
41,825,049 km², a major plate

How it is made

Finished

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
Heading
North-northwest, 335.4°
Speed
1.27 cm a year

History

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: 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

Technical notes

The file

90,039bytes, the whole work
74,112bytes of engine, gzip and base64
0network requests
2048 pxdrawn on up to 8 workers, at your screen’s size

One HTML file: the engine (151,144 bytes minified), this plate's data and a small loader. It reads your clock and slides the view to where the plate is today.

engine sha256 a7fbc03acc0fc9ba343881bb88ddaf2b7564564d8bc9cbed16e75e47e01fb3f2

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.

The work

Live

One HTML file that drifts with your clock, a few centimetres a year.