Sunda, Plates, Kenny Lienhard

The Plate in detail

Sunda, seed 375

Plate 11 of 52 · one of one

Traits

Palette: Malachite
Structure: Fold train
Event: None
Faults: None
Scale: Standard
Hang: Level
Accent: Repeated
Era: Sundaland
Heading: East, 94.3°
Speed: 3.98 cm a year

History

The past. Sundaland: with the sea about 115 metres lower, about 2.5 million square kilometres of today’s shallow seas on this plate were dry land, nearly doubling its land, and Borneo, Sumatra, Java and the Malay Peninsula were one landmass with mainland Asia, drained by great rivers. The land was already dry when the timeline begins; the rising sea drowned most of it between 14,446 and 8,876 years ago, fastest in a meltwater pulse about 14,500 years ago. The lines that stand for the sea turn to the colour of land, all at once, and only across those spans.

227 million years ago: Continental blocks that had drifted from Gondwana collided and joined, building the core of Southeast Asia.
33 million years ago: The South China Sea began to open as new ocean floor spread apart.
73,900 years ago: The largest volcanic eruption on land of the last 2.6 million years spread ash across both hemispheres.

Sources: Hanebuth et al. 2000, Science 288:1033; Sathiamurthy and Voris 2006, Natural History Journal of Chulalongkorn University Suppl. 2:1; Lambeck et al. 2014, PNAS 111:15296 · Metcalfe 2013, Journal of Asian Earth Sciences 66:1 · ICS International Chronostratigraphic Chart v2024/12 (Cohen et al. 2013, updated), stratigraphy.org · Li et al. 2014, Geochemistry Geophysics Geosystems 15:4958 · Storey, Roberts and Saidin 2012, PNAS 109:18684

Onchain

The file

96,109bytes, the whole work

74,112bytes of code that draws it

6,041bytes 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: Sunda, a minor plate in Bird’s PB2002 model: 8,916,246 km², 71% ocean
Its motion: A pole at 44.61°N 73.52°W turning 0.468° per million years; at its centre 4.0 cm a year, heading east
What covers it: shelf sea 31%, slope and ridge 25%, deep ocean 15%, rainforest 12%, and seven more
Its past: Sundaland, between 30,100 and 8,876 years ago, with its account and source
Deep history: Three dated events, the oldest 227 million 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.

Sunda

Finished