Scientists
discovered evidence of an ancient “lost Continent” under the Indian Ocean
island Mauritius.
The
continent which geologists call Mauritia was part of today’s Madagascar and India.
It is assumed that the continent sank into the sea about 84 million years ago.
“We are
studying the break-up process on the continents in order to understand the
geological history of the planet.” said study leader author Lewis Ashwal of the
University Witwatersrand of South Africa.
It seems
that it was part of a gigantic supercontinent Gondwana which broke up to be Antarctica,
Africa, Australia and South America.
Ashwal and
his colleges discovered minerals in the rocks which were in the lava coming
from volcanic eruptions and were far too old to belong to the island of
Mauritius. He explained further that earth is made up of two parts of the
continent old and oceans are young.
Rocks can
be billions of years old but nothing is found like that in the oceans.
Mauritius is
only a few billion years old. The discovered zircon crystals on the island are
estimated three trillion years old.
The scientists
explained further that the found zircons of this age proves that there are much
older crustal materials under Mauritius that could only originated from a
continent.
It is now
assumed that there are likely more pcs of various sizes of “undiscovered
continents named together Mauritia spread over the Indian Ocean.
A full
article is in the British journal Nature Communications.
No comments:
Post a Comment