Galapagos

Kenny Lienhard, Plates, 2026

Palette: Obsidian
Structure: Graben
Drift: 5.9 cm a year, east-northeast

14,625 km², a micro plate

The Plate in detail

Galapagos, seed 519

Plate 51 of 52 · one of one

Traits

Palette: Obsidian
Structure: Graben
Event: None
Faults: Two
Scale: Standard
Hang: Level
Accent: Repeated
Heading: East-northeast, 59.8°
Speed: 5.92 cm a year

History

1.4 million years ago: This tiny microplate formed where the Pacific, Cocos and Nazca plates meet, and began to spin.

Sources: Smith et al. 2013, Earth and Planetary Science Letters 371:6 · Lonsdale 1988, Journal of Geophysical Research 93:13551

Technical notes

The file

90,022bytes, 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.