At a depth of more than eleven thousand feet, puncturing million-year-old sedimentary rocks, the Sunniland Oil Trend became Florida’s first commercial oil well. That same year, Humble Oil and Refining Company (a forerunner of ExxonMobil) hit pay dirt in the northwest corner of the Everglades. ![]() In 1943, the Florida legislature offered prospecting oilmen a $50,000 finder’s fee to the first to discover petroleum in the state. We can thank the oil industry for this bit of geological trivia. The little scrap drifting across the vast and newly flooded ocean became the foundation of the Florida peninsula. After the collision, the supercontinents split apart again, but a sliver of the western coast of Gondwana was ripped off and stuck to Laurentia. During the Precambrian period-the earliest measurement of geological time, roughly seven hundred million years ago-as the glaciers melted, the seas were pumped with oxygen, trilobites outgrew and shed their armored bodies, and a layer of rhyolite and granite formed underneath the supercontinent of Gondwana, the basis of present-day Africa, which was slowly drifting east on a collision course with the supercontinent Laurentia, what would become North America. ![]() “If the leaf stays long upon the soap, it will become soap.” Afro-Cuban religions find a home in Florida
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