Tonga

Kenny Lienhard, Plates, 2026

Palette: Rhyolite
Structure: Fold train
Drift: 11.1 cm a year, east

253,621 km², a micro plate

The Plate in detail

Tonga, seed 39

Plate 39 of 52 · one of one

Traits

Palette: Rhyolite
Structure: Fold train
Event: None
Faults: None
Scale: Standard
Hang: Level
Accent: Single
Heading: East, 100.6°
Speed: 11.15 cm a year

History

5.5 million years ago: The Lau Basin began to open behind the Tonga arc.

Sources: Ruellan et al. 2003, Geochemistry Geophysics Geosystems 4

Technical notes

The file

89,986bytes, 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.