Australia is the fastest-moving continent on Earth, resting on high of a tectonic plate that’s drifting at about 7 centimeters (just below 3 inches) annually – that’s someplace between the speed at which your hair and fingernails develop.
By comparability, Earth’s land lots transfer at a mean charge of about 1.5 centimeters (0.6 inches) a 12 months, in line with NOAA. By comparability, Australia is forward of the competitors because it embarks on its northward drift.
Technically talking, we’re speaking in regards to the Indo-Australian plate, a tectonic plate that features mainland Australia and the island of Tasmania, plus parts of New Guinea, New Zealand, and the Indian Ocean basin.
Ultimately (let’s say, a couple of tens of hundreds of thousands of years from now), it’s potential that the Indo-Australian plate might smash into the underside of the Eurasia plate round Southeast Asia and China, forming a brand new continental array that some have dubbed “Austrasia”.
This transfer isn’t with out historic precedent. Till 200 million years in the past, Australia was related to Gondwana, an enormous supercontinent that occupied many of the Southern Hemisphere. Underneath this setup, the African Plate, Antarctic Plate, Indo-Australian Plate, and South American Plate had been all smooshed collectively. In the meantime, Laurasia – together with most of at the moment’s Europe, Asia, and North America – all sat collectively within the Northern Hemisphere.
Map exhibiting the principal tectonic plates of the Earth.
Picture credit score: Peter Hermes Furian/Shutterstock.com
It’s essential to keep in mind that Earth’s continents are consistently in a state of (veeery sluggish) flux. We don’t really feel it in our on a regular basis lives whereas wandering round Earth, however the planet’s floor isn’t as strong because it appears. Tectonic plates are consistently transferring, some crashing into one another, others drifting aside. Fairly than a rock-solid sphere, one other option to think about Earth is sort of a cracked highway on a slow-moving conveyor belt. Some cracks widen, others get squeezed, and your entire floor is in movement; it’s simply at a tempo too sluggish to see.
As sluggish as it could be by human requirements, it’s quick sufficient to trigger confusion for our know-how. Geolocation instruments – just like the US’s International Positioning System (GPS), Russia’s GLONASS, the European Union’s Galileo, and China’s BeiDou – use satellites to find out areas in relation to identified reference factors. Nonetheless, these satellites function primarily based on mounted coordinate methods, whereas the landmass itself is slowly shifting. Over time, this motion creates a mismatch between the place maps assume areas are and the place they really are.
Till 2017, Australia used coordinates from 1994. Over 23 years, it grew to become out of sync with the tectonic plate by 1.6 meters (5.2 ft), forcing them to replace the system. In impact, Australia formally moved 1.8 meters (5.9 ft) northeast.
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