TerraPlot - Maria Alex

How did ocean floor limestone end up floating five miles in the sky at the highest point on Earth? Maria traces the high-speed, 70-million-year tectonic sprint of the Indian continent across the vanished Tethys Ocean, its violent impact with Eurasia, and how the creation of the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau transformed global climate and birthed the Asian Monsoon.

Fifty million years ago, the South Pole was not a frozen wilderness of white ice; it was covered in lush, rain-drenched temperate rainforests where dinosaurs and early mammals roamed. Maria explores the tectonic breakup of supercontinent Gondwana, the opening of the Drake Passage, and the birth of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current that thermally isolated a continent and locked it in ice forever.
#TerraPlot #Antarctica #DrakePassage #GreenhouseEarth #PolarGeology #Paleoclimate

Beneath the muddy waters and fertile soil of the modern Nile River lies a hidden geological secret: a massive, ancient mega-canyon carved into solid granite, deeper than the Grand Canyon of Arizona. Join Maria as we reconstruct the 6-million-year paleogeographic evolution of the Nile River—from the canyon-carving Eonile to the volcanic flood basalts of Ethiopia that brought fertility to ancient Egypt.
#TerraPlot #NileRiver #Eonile #EgyptGeology #DeepTimeCanyon #Paleogeography

How do you evaporate an entire ocean, and what happens when the dam breaks? In this episode, Maria dives into the mechanical collapse of the Gibraltar gateway, the 1970 discovery of the subterranean "Salt Giant" by the Glomar Challenger research vessel, and the apocalyptic Zanclean Megaflood that refilled the Mediterranean basin in a matter of months with a torrent a thousand times greater than Niagara Falls. #TerraPlot #ZancleanFlood #GlomarChallenger #Oceanography #SaltGiant #Geology

Step into deep time with paleogeographer Maria Alex Cynthia Redmond as we peel back the soft green layers of our modern world to explore a jaw-dropping catastrophe six million years ago: the Messinian Salinity Crisis. Discover how the Mediterranean Sea vanished into a bone-white salt desert three miles beneath sea level, turning a cradle of life into a scorching, hyper-pressurized abyss, and learn how geologists read the profound story written in ancient rock strata.
 #TerraPlot #DeepTime #Paleogeography #MessinianSalinityCrisis #EarthSciences #GeologyPodcast