Florida Naturally.com

Then, as they melted, the seas resumed, submerging the Florida peninsula. Each time the glaciers melted and the seas resumed, the water level was lowered because much of the land mass was slowly rising. The lower areas of Florida, however, still held water, creating inland lakes such as enormous Lake Okeechobee. The foundation for the Florida Keys was laid 100,000 years ago by billions of tiny coral animals.

Eventually this multitude of workers created a 150-milelong chain of underwater coral reefs. As the land mass of southern Florida began its slow rise from the sea, the reefs also began to emerge. What resulted were the many islands of the Florida Keys, constructed mainly of fossilized coral rock. Florida’s land is highest on its north end and from there slopes slowly southward into the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico.

Rolling hills around Orlando flatten out into sawgrass prairies from Lake Okeechobee south. From there the land is so flat that the Everglades’ invisible river water “flows” at a record speed of one-quarter mile every 24 hours!

The land masses of Florida is very young in geological years having emerged from the sea as recently as 20 to 30 million years ago. For millions of years its bedrock lay beneath the warm ocean waters, slowly collecting sediment and forming limestone deposits that would one day break the surface and become a new land.The constant wearing by warm sea waves, wind and rain has resulted in a land that often seems as level as a banquet table.

The state’s highest point, an unspectacular 345 feet, is found near its far northern border, where rolling hills are heralded as relief from the monotonous flatness. But the limestone that serves as anchor—much of it covered with sand, some with red clay or soils rich enough to nourish superb vegetables and fruits—offers up a variety of treasures beneath its ever-eroding, brittle crust.

In some places fresh water bubbles up in tiny sinkholes and sensational springs; in others, bones of mammoths attest to a busy Pleistocene period; elsewhere, rich phosphate rock summons new mining enterprises.