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In the South, there is a political strip of blue in a sea of red, and that strip hints at a 100 million-year-old coast that still shapes our world today...
[thread based on the article by @DrCraigMc]
#ElectionNatureMarathon
https://bit.ly/2HWhWeC
https://www.deepseanews.com/2012/06/how-presidential-elections-are-impacted-by-a-100-million-year-old-coastline/
![In the South, there is a political strip of blue in a sea of red, and that strip hints at a 100 million-year-old coast that still shapes our world today...[thread based on the article by @DrCraigMc] #ElectionNatureMarathon https://bit.ly/2HWhWeC https://www.deepseanews.com/2012/06/how-presidential-elections-are-impacted-by-a-100-million-year-old-coastline/](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/El7Bd8OXUAMtzz-.jpg "In the South, there is a political strip of blue in a sea of red, and that strip hints at a 100 million-year-old coast that still shapes our world today...[thread based on the article by @DrCraigMc] #ElectionNatureMarathon https://bit.ly/2HWhWeC https://www.deepseanews.com/2012/06/how-presidential-elections-are-impacted-by-a-100-million-year-old-coastline/")
[thread based on the article by @DrCraigMc]
#ElectionNatureMarathon
https://bit.ly/2HWhWeC https://www.deepseanews.com/2012/06/how-presidential-elections-are-impacted-by-a-100-million-year-old-coastline/
That strip of blue was formed at the birth of the Atlantic, a fertile coast a the edge of a continent still ruled by dinosaurs like Triceratops, Tyrannosaurus, and relatives of the velociraptor. At the warm shore of the future southern US...
The waves glistened with algae that grew in the shallow depths, & when these algae died their minuscule remains sank to the seafloor, forming a thick grave of carbonate skeletons, building up over millennia. And when the Atlantic began to retreat, what remained...
was a porous rich band of black soil, known as the Black Belt. Over 100 million years after those algae basked in that shallow sea, their bodies would give rise to cotton: at times over 4,000 bales a year. And that cotton...
Was harvested by enslaved who were shipped across the now vast Atlantic, carried from Africa to the Americas against their will to pick cotton in that fertile black soil...
And so the Black Belt, originally named for the soil, took on a different meaning...
And as @DrCraigMc states "The legacy of ancient coastlines, chalk, soil, cotton, and slavery can still be seen today. African Americans make up over 50%, in some cases over 85%, of the population in Black Belt counties..."
