South Bismarck, Plates, Kenny Lienhard

The Plate in detail

South Bismarck, seed 504

Plate 36 of 52 · one of one

Traits

Palette: Serpentine
Structure: Fold train
Event: None
Faults: None
Scale: Standard
Hang: Level
Accent: Single
Era: Low seas
Heading: East-southeast, 102.5°
Speed: 2.95 cm a year

History

The past. With the sea about 120 metres lower, some 10,000 square kilometres of this plate’s shallow seas were dry land, half of it around West New Britain. New Britain was about a quarter larger, and on today’s seabed it reached across the Siassi shelf to Umboi. The land was already dry when the timeline begins; the rising sea drowned most of it between 15,777 and 7,615 years ago. The raised coral reefs of the Huon Peninsula record that rise, on a coast that great earthquakes still lift by about 3 metres every thousand years or so. The lines that stand for the sea turn about a third of the way to the colour of land, all at once, and only across those spans.

3.5 million years ago: The Manus Basin began to open along this plate's northern edge.

Sources: Lambeck et al. 2014, PNAS 111:15296; Edwards et al. 1993, Science 260:962; Ota and Chappell 1996, Journal of Geophysical Research 101:6071 · Taylor 1979, Geology 7:171

Onchain

The file

94,642bytes, the whole work

74,112bytes of code that draws it

4,546bytes 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 Bismarck, a micro plate in Bird’s PB2002 model: 309,093 km², 77% ocean
Its motion: A pole at 6.88°N 31.68°W turning 8.130° per million years; at its centre 3.0 cm a year, heading east-southeast
What covers it: slope and ridge 61%, rainforest 19%, deep ocean 10%, shelf sea 5%, and nine more
Its past: Low seas, between 30,100 and 7,615 years ago, with its account and source
Deep history: One dated events, the oldest 3.5 million years ago, each with its source
Its outline: 96 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 Bismarck

Finished