Geologists Discovers Lost Continent Beneath Indian Ocean
Geologists from the South Africa’s University of the Witwatersrand discovered a lost continent beneath Mauritius at the bottom of the Indian Ocean.
200 million years ago, continents such as South America, Antarctica, Australia, Africa, and India were formed, when the supercontinent Gondwanal has been shattered. Researchers called the island “Mauritia,” a continental fragment broke off from other continents.
Researchers found minerals and zircons in the granite located at the continent of Mauritia, which is 8 million years old. The possible location of the continental fragments in the Indian Ocean including Seychelles and Laxmi Ridge with yellow shading and Mauritia with browning shading, illustrated in the image below:
“The fact that we have found zircons of this age proves that there are much older crustal materials under Mauritius that could only have originated from a continent,” said by Lewis Ashwal, from Wits University and lead author of the report published in Nature Communications this week quoted by Yahoo.
Zircon crystals found by researchers has the same age on the beaches of Mauritius. Critics doubt the mineral samples because it might have been brought to the island from somewhere. The crystals recovered from trachyte rocks and igneous rock were studied by Ashwal.
Ashwal’s team was studying the rocks samples carefully and they’re doing their best to avoid contamination from other rock samples. German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam’s laboratory had never processed the rocks as old as zircons.
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