The plate gate during Sam's expedition to Australia.
A Plate Gate is a wormhole between continents on the Earth's surface.
Overview[]
Background[]
During the Permian and Triassic periods, all the world's landmasses were united in a supercontinent known as Pangaea. Tectonic plate movements led to its breakup and separation, forming the continents of today, event that will contribute to the formation of pate gates in the future. DNA analysis has revealed genetic commonalities between Native Americans and the Polynesian peoples of Oceania, indicating that first contact occurred around 1200 AD. However, the people lacked the technology necessary to cross several thousand kilometers of ocean, suggesting the possibility that a plate gate connected the two continents many centuries ago.
Recent times[]
The plate gate is a phenomenon that occurred near the geophysics research lab in Mexico around the time Sam began connecting the UCAs to the chiral network. At first, it was just a microscopic distortion in the structure of space, but as the UCAs' chiral network expanded, it became increasingly larger, which allowed a rare species of bird not native to the region first and then marsupials to cross it. These phenomena prompted the scientists of the laboratory to send an autonomous robot through the gate, and the samples it collected were consistent with data from the Southern Hemisphere, later confirmed by some survivors who crossed the gate. The conclusion was as follows: the plate gate connects Mexico to southwestern Australia and can be used for travel between the two continents. Upon learning that Australia had survived the Death Stranding, the researchers began to work closely with Bridges to study the plate gate, running a series of tests, to prepare for a future expedition to Australia making the expansion of the chiral network possible.
During their next advanced expedition, APAC built four environmental observatories at specific points on the Australian continent that, once connected to the chiral network, will be able to calculate where and when the next plate gate will appear.
It is currently the only phenomenon of its kind ever recorded but, it is predicted that the network's expansion across Australia will materialize similar plate gates across the continent, and indeed three possible plate gate emergences have been detected. As the Death Stranding has rendered most forms of non-terrestrial long-distance travel impossible, the plate gate is the only known means of crossing to different continents.
Future events[]
Given that tectonic shifts continue today, however, the continents are predicted to rejoin in about 250 million years, forming a new supercontinent known as Nova Pangea. Recent studies have found that the plate gates that have appeared in Mexico and Australia are located in locations that will overlap in the future supercontinent when it forms. Furthermore, coordinate studies by Heartman and APAS have revealed that the individual Beaches are also connected, in a form that is strikingly similar to Nova Pangea.
Gate Quakes[]
Gate quakes are earthquake-like phenomena caused by the passage of matter through a plate gate. However, unlike normal earthquakes, the strength of the shock is not always proportional to the distance from the epicenter, which is the plate gate itself, but instead they often occur elsewhere, seemingly randomly.
Gate quakes waves appear to be strongly influenced by tar currents, in extreme cases a localized tremor affecting a radius of 100 meters has been observed, and can also cause "abnormal reverberations" in it. This is believed to be the reason why strong quakes have occasionally been observed in areas distant from the plate gate. Since these quakes are different from classic earthquakes, they use their own magnitude measurement system, called the G-scale, where the higher the number, the stronger the shock.
Notes[]
- Given that the scientists believed that matter passing through the plate gate causes the gate quakes, they expected that controlling and regulating the plate gate would allow them to reduce quakes, and that extending the chiral network across Mexico and Australia allows for that.
- There’s a theory doing the rounds that suggests gate quakes are “the tremors of BTs and the dead passing through undiscovered gates on the Beach and the world beyond.”