Ancient plate boundary in the Southern AppalachiansAnyone reading this post in Florida or Southeast

Ancient plate boundary in the Southern AppalachiansAnyone reading this post in Florida or Southeast Georgia? The land you’re standing on started this portion of its story as part of Gondwanaland. What we know of today as Florida started off as the Suwannee Terrane, a block of crust that was hooked to the northwestern coast of what is today Africa.About 300 million years ago, Africa slammed into North America, closing the ocean that once existed between the continents and driving the formation of huge mountains. The crust shifted around on a number of faults, and when the continents separated again the new rift didn’t form at the same spot where the continents came together.The original boundary between North America and Africa was a major fault, a subduction zone on which the oceanic crust between the two continents slipped down into the planet. That boundary then became a major thrust fault, similar to the major faults that run through the Himalaya Mountains today. A recent paper used seismic tools to map major structures in the subsurface in this area, and identified the shallow thrust fault still preserved as a boundary in the surface, up to 12 kilometers deep and dipping down beneath the Suwannee Terrane, beneath northern Florida.Other blocks of crust that were once part of Gondwanaland were shoved to the west when the two continents collided, and many of these crustal blocks are now found in Texas and Mexico.-JBBImage credit and original paper (used here for non-commercial, educational use):http://bit.ly/2E3DLmbAdditional paper:http://bit.ly/2BZRNrw -- source link

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