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There’s Still A Piece of Canada Stuck To Australia: Scientists Claim
January 25, 2018 | By Guestauthors
By Amal Ahmed* (Popular Science): At its closest point, the western coast of Canada is more than 7,000 miles away from the edge of Australia. But the world map hasn’t always been that way.
Researchers at Curtin University in Australia published a study in Geology which found that more than a billion years ago, a chunk of present-day Canada broke away from the fledgling North American continent and smashed into Australia. That chunk of land is present-day Georgetown, Australia.
The collision produced a mountain range in northern Australia, although a relatively small one. The same type of landmass collisions created the Himalayas in India, but with much greater force, creating a larger range that’s still growing taller today.
The researchers at Curtin looked at new sediment data from Georgetown and the neighboring regions, and realized that the rock record didn’t match the rest of the Australian continent. But it did match areas of Canada, which is why the paper hypothesizes that two distinct land masses collided.
A visualization created by NASA shows the alignment of Earth’s plates which is responsible for the map of the world that we are familiar with today. NASA
“This new finding is a key step in understanding how Earth’s first supercontinent Nuna may have formed,” Zheng-Xiang Li, one of the study’s co-authors, said in a press release. The Earth’s crust, which contains its land masses and the ocean floors, isn’t static—it’s made up of plates that shift, slide, and collide. Think of each plate like a puzzle piece, except that the pieces can overlap and move, and there isn’t one correct alignment. Because those plates are always moving, the arrangement of continents and oceans has been in flux over the last several billion years.
The seven distinct continents we know and love today are thought to have started off as one, giant landmass called Pangea nearly 300 million years ago. Eventually, the land mass broke apart as plates shifted, pulling pieces of the supercontinent in different directions. You might recall some of this from your elementary school science class.
NOTE: Above write-up was previously published in Popular Science under title: “There’s still a piece of Canada stuck to Australia” by Amal Ahmed at source url: https://www.popsci.com/nuna-canada-crashed-into-australia. Its reproduced as above for the information of readers of the Sikh Siyasat News.
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