The facts we learn in elementary school might feel immutable, but science is never static, and our understanding is always evolving. For example, you may have learned about the three phases of matter (or four, if your school was hip to plasma), but Bose-Einstein condensates likely weren’t on your fifth grade cirriculum. Oh, and Pluto—that’s not a planet.
In other words, things can change. And now, a new “immutable fact” is under some scientific scrutiny, as two new studies suggest that the Earth technically contains six continents—not seven. While Antarctica, Africa, South America, Asia, and Australia remain as separate continents, new research centered around Greenland and Iceland shows evidence that North America and Europe might still be in the process of breaking up. The results of these studies were published in the journal Gondwana Research and Geology.
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“The discovery indicates that the North America and Eurasian tectonic plates have not yet actually broken apart, as is traditionally thought to have happened 52 million years ago,” Jordan Phethean, lead author of the study, told Earth.com.
However, you don’t have to throw out the core concepts of elementary school geography quite yet—Phethean’s hypothesis is controversial and only in the conceptual phase. The evidence for this extraordinary claim centers around the Greenland Iceland Faroes Ridge (GIFR), which is actually connected to Canada via a proto-microcontinent under the Davis Strait. Because this area is still experiencing rifting and microcontinent formation, Phethean suggests that the two continents are still technically linked.
These interconnected landforms are part of a larger kind of geologic formation called Rifted Oceanic Magmatic Plateaus, or ROMPs. According to the Geology study, Phethean and his team analyzed a similar structure in Central Afar—a relatively young rift system in eastern Africa—to better understand the early phases of how these structures form, and to glimpse into the geology of the North Atlantic ROMP’s distant past.
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“Central Afar represents the early stage of development of a specific type of oceanic plateau: a rifted oceanic magmatic plateau,” the paper reads. “ These features begin their formation before continental rifting and develop into wide magmatic rift systems capable of isolating slivers of continental crust within the new igneous crust.”
Of course, geography textbooks aren’t going to be reprinted just yet. After all, it took nearly 30 years after the mass of Pluto was first calculated to bestow on the object its new dwarf planet status.
But, so far, Phethean and his team’s work provides compelling evidence that—at the very least—the continents don’t divide up as cleanly as our ten-year-old selves believed.
Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.
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Publish date : 2024-08-15 02:31:00
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