Atlas

Where things are, and how well that is known

A curated and expanding set of spatial representations — 144 of them, covering 105 entities. This is not a geological map of Earth and does not claim to be one. Every representation is one published interpretation, at one scale, by one identified source, and each carries its own statement of how certain its boundary is.

What this atlas is not

Not complete. Coverage follows source quality and explanatory value, not geography, and large parts of the world have no representation here at all.
Not a bedrock geology map. Everything here is a plate model and its derived regions; no lithology, no crustal age and no structural mapping is included.
Not a basis for locating anything. Nothing on this page ranks ground, scores a region, or assesses what may be present anywhere.
Not more precise than its sources. A figure can be enlarged indefinitely; the evidence behind it cannot.

Figures

World map with twelve small symbols — six filled dark-red circles for porphyry copper deposits in the Andes, western North America, New Guinea and Mongolia, and six open circles with dark outlines for sediment-hosted zinc-lead deposits and one district in North America, Ireland and central Africa — over faint grey plate outlines and a pale coastline. — The twelve records — eleven deposits and one mineral district — for which Lithoen holds a sourced coordinate, over faint plate outlines. Every symbol is the same size: a famous deposit does not get a bigger dot, because symbol size would have to encode a metric and the only metrics available are compiler totals with different definitions in the two databases. Thirteen further deposits in this corpus have no sourced coordinate and do not appear here at all. There is no shading, no interpolation and no density surface. This is a map of records held, and where the symbols cluster is where the compilations looked.

World map showing twenty-four plate outlines as thin dark lines over a pale coastline, with heavier red plate-boundary curves over them, subduction segments dashed, and thirteen hatched purple regions marking zones of distributed deformation. — Twenty-four tectonic plates as outlined in model PB2002 (Bird, 2003), with the boundary curves Lithoen holds for them and the thirteen regions the model calls orogens. Every line here is a model boundary rather than a mapped geological contact: the model is a compilation from published sources at varying scales, its author states that accuracy never equals precision, and boundary class changes along a boundary — so only the segments the source labels subduction are shown as such. Outlines are generalised for display at a recorded tolerance. Areas near the poles are severely exaggerated by the projection, which is stated on the figure.

World map with thirteen hatched purple regions — including the Alps, a large Persia–Tibet–Burma zone, the Andes, the Philippines, western North America and the Laptev Sea — over faint plate outlines. — The thirteen regions model PB2002 calls orogens, shown over faint plate outlines. In that model an orogen is a region where deformation is distributed rather than confined to a boundary, so the rigid-plate description fails there. These are NOT orogenic belts: their outlines delimit the limits of a model, not the extent of any geological province, and Bird gives them spelled-out names specifically to prevent confusion with plates. Several of them — Alps, Persia–Tibet–Burma — coincide with mountain belts, because distributed deformation and mountains have a common cause; the coincidence is not an identity.

Reading the records

What a geometry means

Published interpretive extent: An extent published by an identified author or group as their interpretation. It is citable, reproducible and attributable, and it is one reading rather than the reading. Most extents in a geological corpus are this.
Boundary: A line delimiting or separating things — a plate boundary, a suture, a mapped contact. A boundary is not an extent: it says where the edge runs, not what lies on either side.
Representative point: A single position standing for something that is not a point. It exists so a feature can be shown on a map or listed by location, and it asserts NOTHING about extent. A representative point for a 2,000 km province is a label anchor, not a location.
Tectonic model geometry: Geometry that exists because a model defines it — a rigid-plate outline, a zone where a model declares itself inapplicable. It is a property of the model, and changes when the model is revised. It is present-day geometry from a present-day model; a palaeogeographic reconstruction is a different thing and Lithoen does not hold one.

How certain an edge is

Defined: The boundary is fixed by a definition rather than found in the field — a model boundary, a stated coordinate limit, an administrative extent of a survey. It is exactly where it says it is, because it is a definition.
Interpreted: The boundary was placed by a geologist reading evidence: mapping, geophysics, geochronology, structure. It is reproducible from that evidence and it is an interpretation of it. Most geological boundaries are this.
Approximate: The position is known only within a distance much larger than the line width on any map that shows it. Drawing it thinner does not make it better known.

Every representation

The complete list, and the non-visual equivalent of the figures above. Nothing on this page exists only inside an image.

Every published spatial representation in the Lithoen corpus, with the entity it describes, what the geometry means, how certain its boundary is, and its size.
Entity	Type	Geometry means	Boundary	Status	Positions
Aitik	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Ashele	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Beatson	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Bhimatangar	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Bingham Canyon	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Bjurliden	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Bulong	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Buruktal	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Çalda?	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Caleta Coloso	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Cawse	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Cerro Matoso	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Chuquicamata	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Corocoro	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Dzhezkazgan	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
El Teniente	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Ellamar	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Escondida	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Estaçao	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Gacun	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Grasberg	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Greenvale	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Kennecott	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Khandiza	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Kipushi	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Konrad	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Kosaka (Uchinotai-Uwamuki)	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Las Vigas	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Lubin	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Madneuli	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Maleevskoe	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Marlborough	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Moa	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Murrin Murrin	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	established	1
Navan	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Neves-Corvo	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Nicaro	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Nkamouna	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Novo-Berezovskoe	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Ora Banda	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Oyu Tolgoi	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Ozernoe	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Pine Point	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Punta Gorda	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Pyke Hill	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	established	1
Ravensthorpe	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Red Dog	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Richelsdorf	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Ridder-Sokolnoe	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Rio Tinto	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Rock Creek	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Ržanovo	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
San Romeleo	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Serovskoe	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Soroako	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Spar Lake	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	disputed	1
Tarnyerskoe	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Tashiro	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Vihanti	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Vuonos	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Whim Creek	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Wingellina	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Witvlei	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Xiaorequanzi	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Yokota (Motoyama-Hama)	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Zolotushinskoe	Deposit	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
Alaska–Yukon diffuse deformation zone	Geological region	Tectonic model geometry	Defined	modelled	65
Alps diffuse deformation zone	Geological region	Tectonic model geometry	Defined	modelled	80
Gorda–California–Nevada diffuse deformation zone	Geological region	Tectonic model geometry	Defined	modelled	82
Laptev Sea diffuse deformation zone	Geological region	Tectonic model geometry	Defined	modelled	28
New Hebrides–Fiji diffuse deformation zone	Geological region	Tectonic model geometry	Defined	modelled	152
Ninetyeast–Sumatra diffuse deformation zone	Geological region	Tectonic model geometry	Defined	modelled	126
Persia–Tibet–Burma diffuse deformation zone	Geological region	Tectonic model geometry	Defined	modelled	315
Peru diffuse deformation zone	Geological region	Tectonic model geometry	Defined	modelled	50
Philippines diffuse deformation zone	Geological region	Tectonic model geometry	Defined	modelled	59
Puna–Sierras Pampeanas diffuse deformation zone	Geological region	Tectonic model geometry	Defined	modelled	56
Rivera–Cocos diffuse deformation zone	Geological region	Tectonic model geometry	Defined	modelled	14
Viburnum Trend	Geological region	Representative point	Approximate	inferred	1
West-central Atlantic diffuse deformation zone	Geological region	Tectonic model geometry	Defined	modelled	74
Western Aleutians diffuse deformation zone	Geological region	Tectonic model geometry	Defined	modelled	36
Yilgarn Craton	Geological region	Published interpretive extent	Interpreted	inferred	243
African Plate	Tectonic plate	Tectonic model geometry	Interpreted	modelled	431
African Plate	Tectonic plate	Boundary	Interpreted	modelled	72
African Plate	Tectonic plate	Boundary	Interpreted	modelled	51
African Plate	Tectonic plate	Boundary	Interpreted	modelled	164
African Plate	Tectonic plate	Boundary	Interpreted	modelled	29
African Plate	Tectonic plate	Boundary	Interpreted	modelled	125
African Plate	Tectonic plate	Boundary	Interpreted	modelled	258
Altiplano Plate	Tectonic plate	Tectonic model geometry	Interpreted	modelled	23
Altiplano Plate	Tectonic plate	Boundary	Interpreted	modelled	13
Amur Plate	Tectonic plate	Tectonic model geometry	Interpreted	modelled	71
Amur Plate	Tectonic plate	Boundary	Interpreted	modelled	94
Amur Plate	Tectonic plate	Boundary	Interpreted	modelled	17
Anatolian Plate	Tectonic plate	Tectonic model geometry	Interpreted	modelled	33
Anatolian Plate	Tectonic plate	Boundary	Interpreted	modelled	25
Antarctic Plate	Tectonic plate	Tectonic model geometry	Interpreted	modelled	388
Antarctic Plate	Tectonic plate	Boundary	Interpreted	modelled	209
Antarctic Plate	Tectonic plate	Boundary	Interpreted	modelled	302
Antarctic Plate	Tectonic plate	Boundary	Interpreted	modelled	34
Antarctic Plate	Tectonic plate	Boundary	Interpreted	modelled	17
Arabian Plate	Tectonic plate	Tectonic model geometry	Interpreted	modelled	113
Arabian Plate	Tectonic plate	Boundary	Interpreted	modelled	13
Arabian Plate	Tectonic plate	Boundary	Interpreted	modelled	53
Australian Plate	Tectonic plate	Tectonic model geometry	Interpreted	modelled	343
Australian Plate	Tectonic plate	Boundary	Interpreted	modelled	76
Australian Plate	Tectonic plate	Boundary	Interpreted	modelled	143
Australian Plate	Tectonic plate	Boundary	Interpreted	modelled	51
Burma Plate	Tectonic plate	Tectonic model geometry	Interpreted	modelled	36
Burma Plate	Tectonic plate	Boundary	Interpreted	modelled	9
Burma Plate	Tectonic plate	Boundary	Interpreted	modelled	22
Caribbean Plate	Tectonic plate	Tectonic model geometry	Interpreted	modelled	75
Caribbean Plate	Tectonic plate	Boundary	Interpreted	modelled	9
Caribbean Plate	Tectonic plate	Boundary	Interpreted	modelled	53
Caribbean Plate	Tectonic plate	Boundary	Interpreted	modelled	22
Caribbean Plate	Tectonic plate	Boundary	Interpreted	modelled	24
Cocos Plate	Tectonic plate	Tectonic model geometry	Interpreted	modelled	71
Cocos Plate	Tectonic plate	Boundary	Interpreted	modelled	35
Cocos Plate	Tectonic plate	Boundary	Interpreted	modelled	39
Eurasian Plate	Tectonic plate	Tectonic model geometry	Interpreted	modelled	404
Eurasian Plate	Tectonic plate	Boundary	Interpreted	modelled	95
Eurasian Plate	Tectonic plate	Boundary	Interpreted	modelled	569
Indian Plate	Tectonic plate	Tectonic model geometry	Interpreted	modelled	167
Indian Plate	Tectonic plate	Boundary	Interpreted	modelled	85
Juan de Fuca Plate	Tectonic plate	Tectonic model geometry	Interpreted	modelled	56
Juan de Fuca Plate	Tectonic plate	Boundary	Interpreted	modelled	53
Nazca Plate	Tectonic plate	Tectonic model geometry	Interpreted	modelled	215
Nazca Plate	Tectonic plate	Boundary	Interpreted	modelled	108
Nazca Plate	Tectonic plate	Boundary	Interpreted	modelled	62
North American Plate	Tectonic plate	Tectonic model geometry	Interpreted	modelled	395
North American Plate	Tectonic plate	Boundary	Interpreted	modelled	127
North American Plate	Tectonic plate	Boundary	Interpreted	modelled	106
North Andes Plate	Tectonic plate	Tectonic model geometry	Interpreted	modelled	62
North Andes Plate	Tectonic plate	Boundary	Interpreted	modelled	34
Okhotsk Plate	Tectonic plate	Tectonic model geometry	Interpreted	modelled	66
Okhotsk Plate	Tectonic plate	Boundary	Interpreted	modelled	70
Pacific Plate	Tectonic plate	Tectonic model geometry	Interpreted	modelled	507
Pacific Plate	Tectonic plate	Boundary	Interpreted	modelled	30
Philippine Sea Plate	Tectonic plate	Tectonic model geometry	Interpreted	modelled	112
Scotia Plate	Tectonic plate	Tectonic model geometry	Interpreted	modelled	76
Somali Plate	Tectonic plate	Tectonic model geometry	Interpreted	modelled	265
South American Plate	Tectonic plate	Tectonic model geometry	Interpreted	modelled	320
South American Plate	Tectonic plate	Boundary	Interpreted	modelled	47
Sunda Plate	Tectonic plate	Tectonic model geometry	Interpreted	modelled	105
Yangtze Plate	Tectonic plate	Tectonic model geometry	Interpreted	modelled	59

Where the geometry comes from

Sediment-hosted copper deposits of the world (USGS OFR 03-107): Cox, D.P., Lindsey, D.A., Singer, D.A., Moring, B.C., and Diggles, M.F., 2003, Sediment-hosted copper deposits of the world: Deposit models and database: U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 03-107, doi:10.3133/ofr03107.
Volcanogenic massive sulfide deposits of the world (USGS OFR 2009-1034): Mosier, D.L., Berger, V.I., and Singer, D.A., 2009, Volcanogenic massive sulfide deposits of the world: Database and grade and tonnage models: U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 2009-1034, doi:10.3133/ofr20091034.
Ni-Co laterite deposits of the world (USGS OFR 2011-1058): Berger, V.I., Singer, D.A., Bliss, J.D., and Moring, B.C., 2011, Ni-Co laterite deposits of the world: Database and grade and tonnage models: U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 2011-1058, doi:10.3133/ofr20111058.
Porphyry copper deposits of the world (USGS OFR 2008-1155): Singer, D.A., Berger, V.I., and Moring, B.C., 2008, Porphyry copper deposits of the world: U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 2008-1155, doi:10.3133/ofr20081155.
Sediment-hosted zinc-lead deposits of the world (USGS OFR 2009-1252): Singer, D.A., Berger, V.I., and Moring, B.C., 2009, Sediment-hosted zinc-lead deposits of the world: U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 2009-1252, doi:10.3133/ofr20091252.
PB2002 plates, boundaries and orogens as GeoJSON (fraxen/tectonicplates): Plate model PB2002 from Bird (2003), doi:10.1029/2001GC000252; GIS conversion by Hugo Ahlenius, Nordpil, ODC-By 1.0.
Australian Geological Provinces — Archean to Proterozoic tectonic provinces (layer 20): © Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia) 2018, CC BY 4.0. Australian Geological Provinces Database, edition 2013.01.

Coastlines are drawn from Natural Earth, which its authors place in the public domain. No political boundary appears on any Lithoen map: political geography is not the subject here, and border styling would imply editorial positions Lithoen does not hold.

Figures are pre-rendered and carry no map library, no tiles and no external request. See how Lithoen knows what it knows for the epistemic model these records use.