Happy Thought for 23 February, 2024
Have a Happy Thought:
If you’ve ever put something down, and then when you go to look for it,
it’s moved… you’re not alone.
This is even happening on a global scale – continents are shifting,
moving, colliding, and separating all the time.
One cool result of this is that landmarks really far away from each other were actually formed together, or even once were a single thing.
Take, for example, the Appalachian Mountains of eastern North America,
the Scottish Highlands, the Atlas Mountains of northwest Africa, and the islands
Corsica and Sardinia.
From: Correia, P., Murphy,
J.B. Iberian-Appalachian connection is the missing link between Gondwana and
Laurasia that confirms a Wegenerian Pangaea configuration. Sci Rep 10, 2498
(2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-59461-x
Side note: the geologic term for this sort of creation of mountains is called orogeny. And this particular event, raising this giant mountain range, was known as the Variscan orogeny. In case you were looking for a new band name.
How do we know that these continents looked like this? It’s a lot of things, really, but one of the main indications that two modern continents used to be right next to each other is shared plant life (either now, but really in the fossil record). (And yes, a lot of plants don’t necessarily fossilize, but remember last week when we talked about fossil traces? Seeing the fossilised outline of plants, like the shape and texture of a leaf left in mudstone, can give us some great clues too.)
So basically, the plant life and the collision of continents from millions of years ago are still having a say on what we don and where we live, now.
A way we have a say on things now, is through governments. In
Scotland, for example, they have a parliament. And when that Scottish
Parliament passes an Act, it is made official by pressing a wax seal: The Great
Seal of Scotland.
Image: Scottish Parliament Corporate Body - http://www.parliament.scot/help/66524.aspx,
shared under open
government licence.
And the coolest thing about this process is that the wax is produced
on-site! That’s right, bees
that live on the roof of the parliament building make the wax that is used
to formalise these Acts of the Scottish Parliament. And while all of this is in
Edinburgh, in the Scottish Lowlands…
Would those bees be happy living there if not for Laurasia and Gondwana
crashing into each other 300 million years ago, raising up the mountain range
that would later become the Scottish Highlands? We may never know…
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