“B” is for Blake Plateau. The Blake Plateau is a large, relatively shallow carbonate bank that lies two hundred miles off Charleston on the continental shelf. It runs from Cape Hatteras in North Carolina, past South Carolina and eastern Florida, to just north of the Bahamas. The plateau began to form more than 200 million years ago as the North American Plate disengaged from the African Plate creating the Atlantic Ocean. The Blake Plateau’s structure clearly illustrates the process of the North American/African separation as well as the development of continental shelves generally. The plateau is of economic interest because of the discoveries in the 1970s and 1990s of immense deposits of hydrocarbons that might be commercially developed. Many geologists believe that the Blake Plateau may contain huge quantities of usable methane gas.
Dr. Walter Edgar has two programs on South Carolina Public Radio: Walter Edgar's Journal, and South Carolina from A to Z. Dr. Edgar received his B.A. degree from Davidson College in 1965 and his Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina in 1969. After two years in the army (including a tour of duty in Vietnam), he returned to USC as a post-doctoral fellow of the National Archives, assigned to the Papers of Henry Laurens.