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Volume 14, Number 14 July 27, 2008

nature
Also in this section: Disappearing frogs --- can we bring them back? Nature shows its faces in the big city Our region's geological history Good news and bad news about worldwide sanitation International Mangrove Day

From whence came Panama?

by Eric Jackson

The geological and fossil record in most of Panama strongly suggests Panama arose from the sea, rst as an archipelago of volcanic islands, and drifted into its current position to divide the Caribbean S ea from the Pacic O cean. But from which direction did it drift? The expansion of the Panama Canal involves a lot of digging --to expand and straighten Culebra Cut, to build new sets of locks near the present ones at Gatun and Pedro Miguel and to build a new Pacic side entrance channel west of Miraores Lake. That digging esposes layers of rock and soil and uncovers many fossils, which presents great opportunities for geologists and paleontologists. The Panama Canal Authority has teamed up with the S mithsonian Tropical Research Institute (S TRI) and several other institutions to create the Panama Geology P roject to study what has been and will be exposed and unearthed. Already hundreds of fossils, including a rhinoceros femur and a petried forest, have been discovered. It's all going to add up to something of a revolution in aspects of our knowledge of Panama's natural history. It also has more geologists making presentations at S TRI's Tuesday afternoon science lectures, which are usually the domain of various sorts of biologists. O n May 27 Dr. Camilo Montes outlined some of things that the Panama Geology P roject wants to do and to learn at one of these lectures. Earlier, in April, Augustin Cardona, a geologist working at S TRI on a post-doctoral fellowship, spoke about the origins of the S ierra Nevada de S anta Marta in Colombia, a mountain range detached from the eastern range of the Andes, rising above the Caribbean S ea. What the two lectures had in common were questions about the history of the Caribbean Plate, upon which most of the isthmus of Panama rests. Where Panama rose from the sea is one question riding on this inquiry, as is how the mountains around S anta Marta were created. The history of land bridges between North and S outh America --converted by Web2PDFConvert.com

Panama may not be the only one --- is also part of the Caribbean Plate question. Montes said that geologists try to reconstruct events in the fardistant past from the "snapshots" of what can be seen at particular sites. It's not just the number of layers in the terrain, but their structure, chemistry, apparent chronology of deposition and the magnetic orientations of rocks within the layers. The planet's magnetic poles slowly shift around and from time to time reverse, but when that happens the rocks that have been laid down tend to keep their magnetic orientation and that gives clues to the ways that the earth's tectonic plates have shifted and various places and geological formations have been deformed by various natural pressures. Panama's shape --- kind of like a hunchbacked shrimp skewered along the ninth parallel to be roasted on a cosmic barbecue --- "is very suggestive of deformation," according to Montes. "You can measure the deformation in the rock." But how to gure out the distortion is not a single exact science. There are various analog and numeric approaches to building a model that reconstructs geologic history. There are techniques based on the idea that small structures will mimic large ones when it comes to the ways they behave when nature slowly bends or squeezes them. And starting this past April, geologists started applying those techniques to Hodges Hill, which is being taken down for the But they're looking at other markers to determine when certain changes took place. The prevalence of certain chemical markers can identify the tectonic plate from which a formation arose. S ome of these markers, like zircon crystals --- which grow, erode and grow back at rates that can be reasonably estimated --- are useful for dating the rocks. Also useful for dating and natural history mapping is paleomagnetism. The theories of continental drift received a major boost in the 1950s when scientists mapped the magnetism of ocean oors, and discovered that mid-ocean basalt ridges have dierent magnetic orientations. When mapped out, it's fairly easy to see rocks mineralized in mid-ocean underwater volcanic formations and moved, retaining the magnetic polarity that they had when they were cooled from lava into rock by the seawater. (S edimentary rocks likewise acquire the polarity of the earth at the time they accumulated.) U sing the knowledge that began with those discoveries about paleomagnetism, the tectonic plate model and maps of how the planet's land masses have shifted around over geologic time were developed. And what happens when, using paleomagnetism, scientists look back to the time of a single large continent, Pangea? "O nce we do that," Montes said, "in the reconstruction Central America wasn't there." S o, if the chemical composition tells us that this part of Panama arose on the Caribbean Plate, does that mean that Panama formed as an archipelago to the north, and drifted down from where the Caribbean S ea is now located to plug the gap between the major American land masses? Actually, Montes said that the best evidence is that the Caribbean Plate was created in the Pacic about 60 million years ago and came north into the gap. And according to the studies by Dr. Cardona and his colleagues of mountains in northern Colombia, the Caribbean Plate's motions have not been a ma er of smooth drift in one direction, but of o and on motions in various directions, including jostling among and interactions with other tectonic plates. The mountains around S anta Marta, he said, were not the product of same force that uplifted the Andes, but rather of an oblique collision
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between the Caribbean and S outh American plates. S ome six to eight million years ago --before Panama created its current land bridge between continents --- the edges of the plates sheared and shifted, and the Caribbean Plate took a dive under its neighboring plate, pause long enough for some erosion and other alterations to take place, then resumed its dive (subduction), lifting the mountains above, a process that continues. And in the S ierra Nevada de S anta Marta, as is apparently the case now in Panama, geologists and paleontologists are nding hints of previous land bridges between North and S outh America. Cardona noted that there are two dierent models of the Caribbean Plate's development that each have their geologist partisans. And what does he believe? He thinks that, from similarities in the rocks of the Lesser Antilles and the S anta Marta area, and from clues in the fossil record, about 60 to 65 million years ago there was another land bridge connecting the Americas, roughly following the arc of islands that stretches between Florida and the mouth of the O rinoco River in Venezuela in their positions back then. That land bridge, he thinks, eventually broke up as the Antilles drifted their separate ways. Montes agrees that there is evidence pointing to a previous land bridge between the Americas that stretched along the Antilles, but thinks that it may never have been complete all at once, but in various sequences. And Panama? While the concept that has been put forward before is an archipelago rising on the Caribbean plate into the "plug" that lled the gap between the continents, Montes thinks that parts of Panama are 60 million years old and that other parts are much younger volcanic accretions. He thinks that the notion of a collision between Panama riding on a Caribbean Plate with two land masses may not be the real story of how the present land bridge was closed, that when Panama moved into position between the continents it was not a completely formed body of land, but an archipelago on a geological formation that got stretched and squeezed and broken by neighboring plates, prompting volcanic activity that nally lled in the gap between North and S outh America. He's hoping to learn more about this as canal expansion and his studies progress. "There's going to be plenty of new rock to study," Montes pointed out. "We have already found some spectacular fossils."
Also in this section: Disappearing frogs --- can we bring them back? Nature shows its faces in the big city Our region's geological history Good news and bad news about worldwide sanitation International Mangrove Day

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