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Describe the position and origin of the African continent

      

Describe the position and origin of the African continent

  

Answers

Francis
Africa is the world's second largest continent. From the perspective of geologists and paleontologists (scientists studying ancient life forms), Africa also takes center stage in the physical history and development of life on Earth. Africa possesses the world's richest and most concentrated deposits of minerals such as gold, diamonds, uranium, chromium, cobalt, and platinum. It is also the cradle of human evolution and the birthplace of many other animal and plant species, and has the earliest evidence of reptiles, dinosaurs, and mammals.
Present-day Africa, occupying one-fifth of Earth's land surface, is the central remnant of the ancient southern supercontinent called Gondwanaland, a landmass once made up of South America, Australia, Antarctica, India, and Africa. This massive supercontinent broke apart between 195 million and 135 million years ago, cleaved by the same geological forces that continue to transform Earth.
Africa, like other continents, "floats" on a plastic layer of the earth's upper mantle called the asthenosphere. The overlying rigid crust or lithosphere, as it is known, can be as thick as 150 mi (240 km) or under 10 mi (16 km), depending on location. The continent of Africa sits on the African plate, a section of the earth's crust bounded by mid-oceanic ridges in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The entire plate is creeping slowly toward the northwest at a rate of about 0.75 in (2 cm) per year.
The African plate is also spreading or moving outward in all directions, and therefore Africa is growing in size. Geologists say that sometime in the next 50 million years, East Africa will split off from the rest of the continent along the East African rift which stretches 4,000 miles (6,400 km) from the Red Sea in the north to Mozambique in the south.
francis1897 answered the question on January 11, 2023 at 12:13

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