Plates Kenny Lienhard
Plates

Plate 3 of 52

Antarctica

Kenny Lienhard, Plates, 2026

Palette
Opal, from ice
Structure
Graben
Drift
0.9 cm a year, west
58,149,635 km², a major plate

How it is made

Finished

The Plate in detail

Antarctica, seed 107

Plate 3 of 52 · one of one

Traits

Palette
Opal
Structure
Graben
Event
Unconformity
Faults
Two
Scale
Standard
Hang
Level
Accent
Single
Heading
West, 276.5°
Speed
0.94 cm a year

History

3.9 billion years ago
Some of the oldest known rocks on Earth formed, now found in East Antarctica.
182.8 million years ago
Huge volumes of magma spread through the crust as the supercontinent Gondwana began to break apart.
136 million years ago
A new ocean ridge began to split India away from Antarctica and Australia.
83.5 million years ago
After a long rift, Australia broke away from Antarctica.
50 million years ago
South America began to pull away faster from the Antarctic Peninsula, starting to open the Drake Passage.

Sources: Black, Williams and Compston 1986, Contributions to Mineralogy and Petrology 94:427 · Hiess and Bennett 2016, Chemical Geology 427:125 · Burgess et al. 2015, Earth and Planetary Science Letters 415:90 · Mueller and Jokat 2019, Tectonophysics 750:301 · Gibbons, Whittaker and Muller 2013, Journal of Geophysical Research 118:808 · Williams, Whittaker and Muller 2011, Tectonics 30:TC6012 · Livermore et al. 2005, Earth and Planetary Science Letters 236:459 · Eagles and Jokat 2014, Tectonophysics 611:28

Technical notes

The file

90,018bytes, 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.