Plates Kenny Lienhard
Plates

Plate 18 of 52

Yangtze

Kenny Lienhard, Plates, 2026

Palette
Citrine, from cropland
Structure
Horst
Drift
3.9 cm a year, east-southeast
2,201,940 km², a minor plate

How it is made

Finished

The Plate in detail

Yangtze, seed 642

Plate 18 of 52 · one of one

Traits

Palette
Citrine
Structure
Horst
Event
Unconformity
Faults
Two
Scale
Standard
Hang
Level
Accent
Double
Heading
East-southeast, 116.2°
Speed
3.93 cm a year

History

830 million years ago
Two old continental blocks collided and joined to form South China.
232 million years ago
South China collided with North China, dragging some rocks to mantle depths before they rose back to the surface.

Sources: Xia et al. 2018, Precambrian Research 309:56 · Zhao and Cawood 2012, Precambrian Research 222-223:13 · Hacker et al. 1998, Earth and Planetary Science Letters 161:215

Technical notes

The file

90,019bytes, 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.