Caroline

Kenny Lienhard, Plates, 2026

Palette: Azurite
Structure: Fold train
Drift: 6.0 cm a year, west-northwest

1,528,206 km², a minor plate

The Plate in detail

Caroline, seed 280

Plate 20 of 52 · one of one

Traits

Palette: Azurite
Structure: Fold train
Event: Boudins
Faults: None
Scale: Bold
Hang: Level
Accent: Double
Heading: West-northwest, 283.6°
Speed: 5.96 cm a year

History

26 million years ago: The spreading ridge that built this plate's ocean floor shut down.

Sources: Gaina and Muller 2007, Earth-Science Reviews 83:177 · GPlates Portal extinct ridge compilation, Caroline Basin page, portal.gplates.org

Technical notes

The file

90,021bytes, 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.