How Continents Stay in Shape
The shapes of South America and Africa so familiar to us today easily could have been something quite different had there been a shift in the drift of a rift....
When the supercontinent Gondwana had finished breaking apart, about 130 million years ago, the pieces - as they look today - were in place. That includes Australia, Antarctica, India, Madagascar, South America and Africa. But a new study by Dr. Christian Heine, a geologist who did his research at the University of Sydney in Australia, has proposed that South America and Africa almost came to be quite different in shape from today. Continents separate along rifts - similar to cracks - between tectonic plates. If the West African Rift had been successful, and not defeated in a tectonic power struggle with the Equatorial Atlantic Rift, the entire north-west part of Africa would have joined South America.
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