The unique natural wealth of lower Florida has excited the curiosity and imagination and has served the needs of man for at least twenty centuries. Its geographic setting still lures residents and tourists. Everglades National Park is at once a limited and a vast sampling of a region full of contrast. It is made up of adjacent, interrelated areas descriptively called the Florida Everglades, the Big Cypress country, the mangrove coast, the Ten Thousand Islands, the Cape, and Florida Bay. The region has nourished, though sometimes harshly, both exotic and familiar flora and fauna. Its people, from the earliest aboriginal Indians to its present day inhabitants, provide clues and records from which the historian can trace the story of its human history. The Park itself consists of over a million acres of land and water, and is our third largest national park. It is an area without any single point of powerful impact. Many other national parks that are chiefly of geological interest exhibit great peaks, deep gorges, or spectacular scenes of one kind or another. The Everglades, which is chiefly of biological interest, requires a different perspective on the part of the visitor.
             The creation of the Everglades we see today was caused by the fractious interplay of rock and water, acted out in the distant and recent past. The park is located on the southern Florida peninsula, which is very low and flat because it was once an ancient sea bottom. The highest point in the Everglades is just ten feet above sea level. The bedrock of the area is limestone, which is made up of marine sedimentary rock. The contraction and expansion of continental glaciers have altered the landscape. The Florida peninsula has been inundated by and later emerged from the surrounding seas at least four times in recent geologic history. As glaciers expanded, they consumed bodies of water, including the shallow tropical seas covering Florida, causing the l...