Christopher Scotese / Ian Webster / Paleomap / University Of Sydney
It’s not a metaphor or a joke: a plate from the African continent was actually discovered in 2014 under Alabama.
“A long and mysterious zone of unusual magnetism, stretching from Alabama through Georgia to the coast of North Carolina, appears to be the suture between ancient rocks that formed when parts of Africa and North America were compressed about 250 million years ago.” This was the description of in 2014, when a strange thing happened.
It is known that many millions of years Pangeia it was a large continent that broke apart, giving rise to what we know today. Now, during this separation, North America and Africa were in denial: they seem to have wanted to stay together.
Geologist Robert Hatcher described what happened: “There was an attempt to wrest Florida and southern Georgia“, said Hatcher. “So there is a failed rupture. We know that there is a suture between the African crust and the younger Appalachian crust. There is pieces of crust that originated in Africa“.
This is why, for more than a decade, scientists discovered a piece of Africa that was “stuck” to the current USA during rupture.
“There are major flaws in the magnetic data,” said geologist Robert Hatcher of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville at the time, referring to what is called the Brunswick Magnetic Anomaly and other magnetic features in the region. “They have not been active for a long time. They are lateral slip faults, like the one in San Andreas today. But there are also more recent failures with the opposite direction.”
