The earth beneath our feet is alive. Although we don’t notice it every day, The ground we walk on is constantly moving. It is not a rigid and immovable surface, but a vast puzzle made up of tectonic plates that advance, collide, separate or slide past each other slowly but inexorably, just a few centimeters per year. However, when this pent-up energy is suddenly released, the result can be devastating.
Many of the phenomena that make headlines around the world every year arose from this movement. Earthquakes that shake entire cities, volcanoes that erupt, tsunamis that cross oceans, and mountains that keep growing without anyone noticing. None of this is random or isolated: it is this direct result of an active planetwhich is constantly readjusted and leaves a surface in permanent change.
In this way, the map we know today could change radically in the future. In Pangea, this happened 300 million years agothereby fragmenting the supercontinent, which united all the resulting countries into a single mass. This process was neither extraordinary nor unrepeatable: the movement of tectonic plates continues to this day and will continue to reshape the planet’s surface, narrow or disappear oceans, form new continents or change the distribution of land, which would lead to convergence or even convergence would unite territories that they are now separated.
And this process may take place much closer than we think, right in the Strait of Gibraltar, the point where the Boundary between the African and Eurasian plates. In this underwater area between Spain and Morocco, known as the Gibraltar Arc, one of the two plates (the African one) began to sink beneath the other (the Eurasian one).
This process, called subduction, was considered by many scientists to have ended due to its significant slowing over the last million years. However, it is a long pause that will eventually be reactivated, moving towards the Atlantic and leading to the rapprochement or even the unification of the two countries. This way, the Strait of Gibraltar would disappearthe Mediterranean would be enclosed as a large saltwater lake and Eurasia and Africa would be geographically united.
This emerges from a study published in the journal in 2024 geology and led by João C. Duarte from the Department of Geology at the University of Lisbon – on how subduction zones form and how they migrate between oceans. Research suggests that in the Gibraltar Arc, although it is in a slow phase, its subduction process is not yet complete: Within 20 million years, this will be activated again and advance towards the Atlantic Ocean, creating a new subduction system there.
To determine this, the research team ran 3D simulations to see if a stopped arc like Gibraltar’s could be restarted. The result was that once enough force or tension was built up to overcome resistance in the surrounding lithosphere, movement would occur again.
In this way, the map we currently have will change drastically in millions of years. And the Wilson cycle – a theory that explains how oceans and continents form, grow and disappear – proves this The oceans are not eternal: These large bodies of water are created when the Earth splits, they grow slowly, mature when they reach their maximum size, begin to gradually decrease as subduction occurs, and finally close, causing the continents to collide.
The disappearance of the Strait of Gibraltar will not happen tomorrow, next year or for thousands of years. The process is very slow if we talk about human time frames, and scientists appreciate that Tens of millions of years this change. However, the fact that the movement of tectonic plates in this area is currently in quiet phases does not mean that it cannot take place. Events with a big impactlike the earthquake and subsequent tsunami that claimed tens of thousands of lives in Lisbon in 1755. It is a sleeping system, but latent, not inactive.
With all this, the study suggests that if complete subduction occurs as the seafloor is consumed, both continents would reunite within tens of millions of years. A scenario that cannot be fully certified because The path of tectonic plates can change.
Spain and Morocco will continue to be separated by the Strait of Gibraltar for the time being, but one centimeter closer every year.
Another noteworthy point of the study is the suggestion that a phenomenon may occur in the Atlantic, which in the Pacific is the result of the large number of earthquakes and volcanoes in the region: a ring of fire.
This term refers to a circular or horseshoe-shaped strip extending around an ocean in which a major seismic and volcanic activity. This happens when there are many active subduction zones in the region, which cause earthquakes and volcanoes more frequently.
This is already happening in the Pacific Ring of Fire, which begins in South America, passes through Central America and North America, passes into Asia and descends into Oceania. For this reason, seismic and volcanic activity occurs in Japan, Indonesia and Chile, among others.
In the very distant future (humanly speaking), another Ring of Fire could form in the Atlantic within tens or hundreds of millions of years: when a plate sinks in one place, as is happening with the African plate, which pushes the Eurasian plate northward, stress increases in neighboring plates, which may cause renewed sinking at nearby points. This way, A subduction belt is formed.
So if subduction of the Gibraltar Arc westward toward the Atlantic is reactivated and continues, as the study suggests, and this belt is eventually formed, the most affected areas could be southwest Europe (Spain, especially in the southand Portugal, particularly in the Lisbon region and the Algarve), North Africa (Morocco and possibly Algeria and Tunisia), and the Mid-Atlantic and surrounding areas (the oceanic islands of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, such as the Azores).
Despite all this, there is no reason to panic: these geological changes are taking place on a timescale that is unimaginable for humans. Presumably, the Earth will continue to live and change long after our civilizations have fallen, and that is extremely likely we won’t be here anymore when that happens.
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