Find remains of a lost continent beneath the island of Mauritius – https://nmas1.org/

Scientists have confirmed the existence of a “lost continent” beneath the island of Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, submerged during the breakup of the supercontinent Gondwana, a process that started about 200 million years ago.

this Is a piece of bark, later covered by lava young during volcanic eruptions on the island, studied by science, and that suggests that it is only a small piece of the continent disappeared, that was dislodged from the island of Madagascar, when Africa, India, Australia and Antarctica broke away and formed the Indian Ocean.

to Study this surface will enable science to better understand the fragmentation of the continents, in order to determine with more accuracy how it developed the geological history of the planet, according to the geologist Lewis Ashwal, University of Wits, the main author of the research.

The same, entitled "Zircones archaic in ocean rock of the Miocene establish an old continental crust beneath Mauritius" and published in the journal Nature Communications, explores the presence of zircones on the volcanic rocks because their presence is older than the conformation of the island.

^{Some of the zircones found.}

While the continents are rocks of more than four thousand million years ago, in the islands in the oceans, the most recent training that the continental surfaces, the oldest rocks do not pass of 9 million years in the islands. However, in Mauritius, "we have found zircones of up to 3 billion years ago,” says Ashwal. The stone is composed mainly by the granite of the continents, with traces of uranium, thorium and lead, through various geologic processes and can be dated with great precision.

"The fact that we have found zircones of this age shows that in Mauritius there are materials much more ancient that could only originate in one continent,” adds Ashwal.

according To the new findings, he concludes, the decay was not a simple division of the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana, but rather a fragmentation complex "that took place with fragments of continental crust of varying sizes to be left drifting in the Indian Ocean basin in evolution”.

Gondwana is as science calls the super-continent that existed for over 200 million years and that it contained rocks 3.6 billion years ago, before the split into what are now the continents of Africa, South America, Antarctica, India and Australia.

The division occurred due to the geological process of formation of tectonic plates. This is an ongoing process and assumes that the basin of the ocean to move between 2 and 11 cm per year. In the meantime, the continents are mounted on the bottom of the ocean, causing tremors and quakes.

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