“That Time Almonte Was Next Door to Morocco”
by Brent Eades
Some readers may know that I have a strong interest in local history, and that I write stories and post photos of life over the past two centuries in our town.
Today I came across an interesting website that offered to “show how your current address has looked over the past half-billion years.” So I decided to up my local history game a little.
I clicked through the maps and traced the movement of our town’s location as it floated over the Earth’s surface these past 500 million years or so. This was fascinating, and I decided to make a little video of the maps combined with images of how our region might have looked over those many epochs.
It’s all quite intriguing. About 250 million years ago, before the continents began their drift to their current locations, Almonte was a few degrees above the equator and adjacent to what is now Morocco. A hundred million years before that we were deep beneath an ancient ocean.
And did you know that you can still find a physical record of those times here in town? Stop by the Metcalfe Geoheritage Park to learn more about the geologic history of our region.
