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North America Research Paper

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Hundreds of millions of years ago, all of earth’s major landmasses were joined in a single world continent, which geologists call Pangaea. About 200 million years ago, the world continent split into a northern and a southern land mass. The northern continent, Neogea, consisted of what is now North America, Europe, and Asia; the southern continent, Gondwanaland, was made up of South America, Africa, Australia, India, and Antarctica. About 130 million years ago, South American separated from the rest of Gondwanaland and became, in effect, a gigantic island; its creatures, which included marsupials and edentates-precursors of today’s sloths, anteaters and armadillos-developed in isolation. North America separated from Eurasia much later; by then it was already well populated with the ancestors of our cats, dogs, rodents, weasels, and other present-day mammals. It was also inhabited by monkeys, which had migrated from their original home in Africa up through Europe and into North America before the continental separation was complete. For …show more content…

The thicker sections fo the plates are the continents; the thinner parts make up the ocean beds. When two plates meet, the result is geologic upheaval on a vast scale. Such an encounter occurred about 20 million years ago in the region between North and South America. The Cocos Plate, a piece of the Pacific crust some 300 miles wide, moved eastward until it met the crustal plate underlying the Caribbean. The eastern edge of the Cocos Plate was driven beneath the western edge of the Caribbean Plate. As the Cocos Plate was forced downward, the friction, as well as the hear deep within the earth, liquefied its rock into magma, which found release by thrusting up in a chain of volcanoes. The volcanic islands that resulted formed a line of stepping-stones between the northern and southern

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