Unearthing The Long-Lost Continent Underneath An Indian Ocean Island

A 3-billion-year-old long-lost continent once resting between India and Madagascar now creeps under the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. The researchers believed that Mauritius Island was lying on a submerged continent.

Lewis Ashwal, the lead author of the study and a scientist at the University of Witwatersrand, discovered that Mauritius island had a stronger gravitational pull than other parts of the Indian Ocean in 2013. The team also found zircons, iridescent rocks, dated back billions of years and other rocks dated no more than 9 million years old. Ashwal said that the fact that they have found zircons of this age proves that there are much older crustal materials under Mauritius that could only have originated from a continent.

It is thought that Mauritius island was shaped by volcanic activity. On the other hand, the new study indicates that a primeval continent might have been left behind during the split up of the supercontinent Gondwana into India, Africa, Antarctica and Australia more than 200 million years ago. This brought forth the birth of the island that is now visible, according to CBS News.

Ashwal said that based on the new results, this breakup did not involve a simple splitting of the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana. It was rather a complex splintering with fragments of continental crust of variable sizes left adrift within the evolving Indian Ocean basin.

In a 2013 study, the results showed traces of ancient zircons in beach sand on the relatively young island. On the other hand, critics said that the zircon might have been traveled in trade winds or been carried along. Even so, in the new study printed in the journal Nature Communications on Jan. 31, 2017, the team found the zircons embedded in the 6-million-year-old rock called trachyte. This opposes the idea of the wind-blown transfer, according to Ashwal.

Meanwhile, Alan Collins, a researcher at the University of Adelaide in Australia, said that several pieces of old continents are being discovered. He further said that it is only now as they explore more of the deep oceans that they are finding all these bits of ancient continents around the place, as noted by Fox News.