Remnant found of supercontinent, scientists claim

SCIENTISTS have discovered the remnants of what they believe is a continent which was lost when the supercontinent of Gondwana split more than 200 million years ago.

Pieces of a lava-coated crust of the “lost continent” were discovered under the Indian Ocean off Mauritius.

University of the Witwatersrand geologist Lewis Ashwal‚ Michael Wiedenbeck of the German Research Centre for Geosciences and Trong Torsvik of the University of Oslo have studied zircon found from the piece of the continent.

Zircon is a mineral which is discharged by lava during volcanic eruptions.

With the oldest rocks on Mauritius believed to be about nine million years old‚ the newly discovered zircons, about three billion years old, are far too old to belong to the island of Mauritius.

Ashwal said: “Earth is made up of two parts – continents‚ which are old‚ and oceans‚ which are young.”

He is the lead author of the paper “Archaean zircons in Miocene oceanic hotspot rocks establish ancient continental crust beneath Mauritius”‚ which was published in the journal Nature Communications.

“On the continents, you find rocks that are more than four billion years old‚ but you find nothing like that in the oceans‚ as this is where new rocks are formed‚” he said.

Sceptics have criticised the findings, but Ashwal has dismissed these claims.

“We found the ancient zircons in rock [six-million-year-old trachyte, which] corroborates the previous study and refutes any suggestion of wind-blown‚ wave-transported or pumice-rafted zircons for explaining the earlier results‚” he said.