The Lost Ancient World That Once Existed Beneath Canada

On February 13, 1947, a drilling crew south of Edmonton hit something that shouldn't have been there: the remains of a tropical reef, about 1,500 metres beneath flat prairie farmland. The well was Leduc No. 1, and it changed Alberta forever. But it raised a bigger question. How does a tropical sea end up beneath the Canadian Prairies? The answer is that Canada didn't always sit where it sits today. For hundreds of millions of years, the ancient core of North America drifted near the equator, flooded again and again by warm, shallow seas full of reefs, strange early animals, and the first fish moving toward land. You'll learn: 🛢️ Leduc No. 1 and the reef that launched Alberta's oil industry 🦐 The Burgess Shale: seafloor on a mountaintop 🐟 Tiktaalik: a warm-water fish in the High Arctic 🧭 How magnetic rocks prove Canada drifted 🌊 Laurentia and the epicontinental seas 🪨 Ancient seabed at Hudson Bay, Manitoulin Island, the Niagara Escarpment, and Mingan 🧂 The Devonian sea that dried into potash 🦖 The Western Interior Seaway, the Bearpaw Sea, and marine reptiles on the Prairies 🌲 Why Arctic fossil forests are a different story 🧊 How the seas disappeared, and how the land is still rising Which part of Canada are you watching from, and did you know the ground under you was once an ocean floor? Tell me in the comments 👇 🔔 Subscribe for more places where the ground holds a far older story. #Canada #Geology #DeepTime