A fresh new study conducted by the WITS University geologist, Professor Lewis Ashwal confirms the existence of a lost continent under what is now known as Mauritius.
The study is called and rather aptly so Archaean zircons in Miocene oceanic hot spot rocks establish ancient continental crust beneath Mauritius, and was published in the world-renowned journal, Nature Communications.
Ashwal, who is also the lead author on the paper in a comment on the study said, We are studying the break-up process of the continents in order to understand the geological history of the planet.
He elaborated that this lost continent is a left over from the breaking up of a super-continent, which began approximately 200 million years ago.
Named, Gondwanaland existed upwards of 200 million years ago and had rocks as archaic as 3.6 billion years old, before splitting up into what are [contemporarily?] now called the continents of Africa, South America, Antarctica, Australia and also India.
Ashwal further said, The piece of crust under Mauritius, which was subsequently covered by young lava during volcanic eruptions on the island, seems to be a tiny piece of ancient continent, which broke off from the island of Madagascar when Africa, India, Australia and Antarctica split up and formed the Indian Ocean.
The discovery is owed to the studying done through the mineral Zircon, which is found in rocks disgorged by magma during volcanic eruptions.
Ashwal and his colleagues, Dr Michael Wiedenbeck, from the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ), and Trond Torsvik, from the University of Oslo, who is a guest scientist at GFZ, found that the remnants of this mineral were far too old to belong on the island of Mauritius.
Mauritius is an island, and there is no rock older than 9 million years old on the island. However, by studying the rocks on the island, we have found zircons that are as old as 3 billion years, he said.
To which Ashwal responded, Zircons are minerals that occur mainly in granites from the continents. They contain trace amounts of uranium, thorium and lead, and due to the fact that they survive geological process very well, they contain a rich record of geological processes and can be dated extremely accurately.
The geologists however, found that Zircons of this age could prove to be much older crustal matter under Mauritius so much so that they must have only come in origin from a continent.
He said this was not the first time that zircons that were billions of years old had been found on the island. The fact that we found the ancient zircons in rock corroborates the previous study and refutes any suggestion of wind-blown, wave-transported or pumice-rafted zircons for explaining the earlier results, Ashwal commented.
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