Honduras is the little rumpled-underwear-shaped country in Central America with El Salvador and Guatemala sticking out the western leg-hole, and the fat thigh of Nicaragua stuffed in the other.
The piece of land that is Honduras and Nicaragua didn’t finish swinging into its current place until 22 million years ago—pretty recently. While the continents were bumping around the globe, getting acquainted at the geological party known as Pangea, Honduras wasn’t even a twinkle in anyone’s eye. While the dinosaurs were roaming around, the pre-Honduras chunk of land was hanging out in southern Mexico (can you blame it?), and slowly broke away and rotated into place, all the while acquiring some sedimentary deposits that would come in very handy later on. It’s these deposits that make Honduras the proud owner of cement, ice cream, sheet rock, tortillas, pesticides and caves. Let me explain.
Shallow seas covered the pre-Honduras piece of land during the Cretaceous up until about 90 million years ago, very conveniently depositing evaporites like gypsum and limestone. Gypsum is added to ice cream for texture or something like that, and is the main ingredient in everyone’s favorite building material, gypsum board.
Lime is used for everything here: throw it in with corn and it dissolves the outer bran (so it can be used for tortillas), it’s painted on the bases of trees to prevent certain pests, and sprinkled on your farm it raises the pH of your soil. Limestone also dissolves readily in water which results in some awesome caves.
Throughout history, there has been a lot of pushing and shoving of different plates in Central America, which continues today. And this type of tension tends to produce faults and volcanoes. Honduras doesn’t currently have any active volcanoes, but it’s not jealous of its neighbors and their smoking mountain-tops because it has a bunch of mountains, a lake and some hot springs. But holy cow, 19 million years ago there was all kinds of volcanic action in Honduras which covered the eastern part with ash. This is responsible for the abundance of exfoliation-stones that make this great country what it is today. The most dramatic part of the national anthem brags about a volcano, but I think it just fits in the song better than the word lake.
Stay tuned for more exciting installments of Honduran history, the untold story…
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