Researchers Find 'Lost Continent' Under Mauritius

Mauritius, an island on the Indian Ocean, was finally confirmed to be a leftover of a supercontinent called Gondwana, which broke apart about 200 million years ago. The piece of the crust that was thought to be covered by young lava during the island's volcanic eruptions seemed to be a piece of an ancient continent that also broke off from Madagascar when other land masses -- Africa, India, Australia and Antarctica -- broke off to form the Indian Ocean.

Rocks that have been spewed up by lava during these eruptions were recently studied by scientists led by Professor Lewis Ashwal. They found that these rocks were too old to belong in the island of Mauritius. He explained in the paper published in Nature Communications that in continents are rocks that are over 4 billion years old, there are nothing like that in oceans. In oceans, only new rock formations are found.

Mauritius, being an island, should have had no rocks older than 9 million years old. But the zircons that they found are as old as 3 billion years. As noted by Phys.org, zircons occur mainly in granites and are from continents. They contain traces of uranium, thorium and lead. Their ability to survive geological processes can mean that they can be dated pretty accurately, so there should be no mistaking that the zircons found are older than the island itself. This makes a clear evidence that the continent is hiding underneath the island itself. Prof. Ashwal suggested that the "undiscovered continent" that could collectively be called "Mauritia" could be spread over the Indian Ocean, a leftover by Gondwanaland.

Still, as described by Mail Online, the continent in itself could have been a dangerous place covered in volcanoes and is exposed to earthquakes regularly. Prof. Ashwal also asserted the importance of the study, saying that "It allows us to better understand the processes by which continents break apart due to plate tectonics, and it also allows us to reconstruct the positions of these and other pieces of continent back in time."