By Frank Kamuntu
Scientists have found evidence of a lost continent that drifted away from the land mass that became Australia 155million years ago.
Geologists long assumed that Argoland should exist due to a massive void in Western Australia, but until now the evidence was only circumstantial.
A team at Utrecht University in the Netherlands reconstructed the history of Argoland, finding the 3,100-mile piece of land had travelled to South Asia and now sits more than 18,000ft below the surface of the Indian Ocean.
Magnetic and structural geological evidence along the local seafloor suggested that the giant fragment separated through the shifting of tectonic plates that make up the Earth’s crust before drifting north and west toward Southeast Asia.
Eldert Advokaat, of the department of earth sciences at Utrecht University, said: ‘The situation in Southeast Asia is very different from places like Africa and South America, where a continent broke neatly into two pieces. Argoland splintered into many different shards.
‘That obstructed our view of the continent’s journey.’
Researchers used a computer reconstruction based on existing geological evidence to paint a picture of how Argoland broke into multiple pieces, settling around modern-day Indonesia and Myanmar.
Rather than a single land mass, they found many smaller bits that pieced themselves together over millions of years.
By settling this mystery, geologists have filled in a significant knowledge gap, adding new context to the body of evidence on how mountains, islands and undersea geology took shape.
By reviewing the architecture of known southeast Asian and northwest Australian tectonic ‘mega-units,’ the team pieced together scattered remnants of what once comprised Argoland and proposed how they drifted so far from their original site.
During the late Jurassic period 164million to 145million years ago, the massive landmass of Pangaea broke up into two supercontinents, Laurasia and Gondwana. The break was not a clean one, though.
At this time, it seems that Argoland was already split into multiple continental fragments and sections of the seafloor.
The islands of Argoland’s apparent destination do not seem to sit atop anything resembling the theoretical continent. The only bits of ancient continental crust in the region were much older, with radiologic dating placing them at about 205million years old.
