File:Florida Carbonate-Platform-via-Tihansky.jpg: Difference between revisions

What we see of Florida is just part of an enormous carbonate platform that developed over millions of years. When the bit of metamorphic rock that would become Florida's basement rifted off of proto-Africa in the time of Pangea, a basin formed as the baby Atlantic Ocean was born. That's where the Florida Platform began to form: in shallow, warm seas filled with coral reefs and algae with calcium carbonate skeletons, living happily under the sun, producing those calcium carbonate bits that built up incrementally as they died. And this went on for ages, right up through the Paleogene, the geologic age after the death of the dinosaurs. There are cliffs bounding the Florida Platform that are nearly 1,828 meters (6,000 feet) high, beneath the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. That immense carbonate mass may be more than 6,096 meters (20,000 feet) deep. That's a huge amount of potential karst.