Found: A Lost Continent! (Really)

You’d think it would be hard to misplace an entire continent, what with the mountains and trees and all that other hard-to-miss stuff. Now, however, it seems that one of Earth’s continents indeed went missing. The good news is, it’s at last been found, lying below the waters of the Indian Ocean, beneath the tiny, 790 sq. mi. (2,040 sq. km) island of Mauritius. Mauritius long drew the attention of geologists and other scientists because of one curious feature: it’s strong gravitational pull. Earth’s gravity is not completely uniform at all places across the globe, but can be slightly stronger or weaker, depending on the density of the material in the local crust. The moon is dotted by many such “mascons” — or mass concentrations — the remains of heavy metal meteorites that long ago crashed onto the surface and buried themselves where they hit. The Earth has a few too, but it is typically plate tectonics — the constant movement and reformation of the crust — that is responsible. If Mauritius sits atop a mascon, it was likely a result of crustal motion that caused an existing landmass to shatter and sink entirely from view. The island then rose back up to mark the burial site of the lost land like a giant tombstone. That theory was formally advanced by geoscientist Lewis Ashwal of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, in 2013. In a brand new paper, published in Nature Communications, Ashwal seals the d...
Source: TIME: Top Science and Health Stories - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Atlantis geology Gondwanaland lost continent minerals onetime Science zircon Source Type: news