Solomon Sea

Kenny Lienhard, Plates, 2026

Palette: Obsidian
Structure: Graben
Drift: 7.1 cm a year, north

128,668 km², a micro plate

The Plate in detail

Solomon Sea, seed 304

Plate 44 of 52 · one of one

Traits

Palette: Obsidian
Structure: Graben
Event: Unconformity
Faults: Two
Scale: Standard
Hang: Level
Accent: Repeated
Heading: North, 9.9°
Speed: 7.06 cm a year

History

34 million years ago: The ocean floor of this small plate formed at a spreading ridge; studies disagree on the exact age.

Sources: Joshima et al. 1986, Geo-Marine Letters 6:229 · Seton et al. 2020, age grid v2020.1 processed here, Geochemistry Geophysics Geosystems

Technical notes

The file

90,027bytes, 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.