Yangtze, Plates, Kenny Lienhard

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
Era: The East China Sea plain
Heading: East-southeast, 116.2°
Speed: 3.93 cm a year

History

The past. With the sea about 120 metres lower, about half a million square kilometres of this plate’s shallow seas were dry land, two thirds of its sea. The coast of the East China Sea lay near the edge of the shelf, about 500 kilometres east of today’s, the Yangtze built its delta far out on what is now seabed, and Taiwan was joined to the mainland. The plain was already largely dry when the timeline begins; the rising sea drowned most of it between 15,716 and 8,566 years ago. The lines that stand for the shallow sea turn the colour of land, all at once, and only across those spans.

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: Lambeck et al. 2014, PNAS 111:15296; Saito 1998, The Quaternary Research 37:235; Wang et al. 2022, Frontiers in Marine Science 9:863245; Dai et al. 2023, Journal of Marine Science and Engineering 11:2035; Chang et al. 2015, Nature Communications 6:6037 · 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

Onchain

The file

95,325bytes, the whole work

74,112bytes of code that draws it

5,252bytes 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: Yangtze, a minor plate in Bird’s PB2002 model: 2,201,940 km², 34% ocean
Its motion: A pole at 66.16°N 151.27°W turning 0.386° per million years; at its centre 3.9 cm a year, heading east-southeast
What covers it: cropland 32%, forest 25%, shelf sea 25%, slope and ridge 9%, and five more
Its past: The East China Sea plain, between 30,100 and 8,566 years ago, with its account and source
Deep history: Two dated events, the oldest 830 million years ago, each with its source
Its outline: 115 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.

Yangtze

Finished