Lost continent discovered beneath Indian Ocean


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SALT LAKE CITY — Evidence of a long-lost microcontinent has been discovered in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Africa, according to scientists.

Researchers found sand grains on Mauritius, located about 1,200 miles off the coast of Africa, east of Madagascar, that contain materials far older than the island itself.

Scientists believe Mauritius was formed about nine million years ago from cooling lava spewed from undersea volcanoes. Sand grains the researchers examined contain fragments of zircon that are between 660 million and 2 billion years old, though. They concluded that the older minerals once belonged to a long-vanished land mass, and that the zircon was dragged to the surface during the formation of Mauritius.

"When lavas moved through continental material on the way towards the surface, they picked up a few rocks containing zircon," study co-author Bjørn Jamtveit, a geologist at the University of Oslo in Norway, explained in an email to National Geographic.

Most of the rocks are thought to have disintegrated in the high temperatures of the lava, but some would have ended up forming the rocks on Mauritius' surface.


The microcontinent, now called Mauritia, is estimated to have been about a quarter of the size of Madagascar.

The microcontinent, now called Mauritia, is estimated to have been about a quarter of the size of Madagascar. Scientists theorize that it was once part of a larger supercontinent — called Rodinia — made up of India and Madagascar. It was eventually drowned when India and Madagascar broke apart about 85 million years ago.

Jamtveit's team promised even more rigorous methods of discovering lost continents in the future, according to the Australian.

"Critical to furthering our tale of lost continents are deep drilling, acquisition of high-quality seismic refraction data ... coupled with geochemistry, geochronology and plate reconstructions," they said.

The study was published in the current issue of the journal Nature Geoscience.

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Stephanie Grimes

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