A Lost Continental Shelf May Be Buried Deep Under Earth’s Mantle
For centuries, scientists have been exploring theories about a lost continent. It is a land that supposedly existed during prehistory, but has since disappeared.
For hundreds of millions of years, the world’s continents grew together to form giant supercontinents. Then, they slowly began to split off and pull apart again.
The last of these supercontinents was Pangaea, which began to separate about 200 million years ago. Eventually, it broke into the seven continents that exist today: Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America and South America.
Now, researchers are discovering a lost continent that may have been connected to these supercontinents but was never fully formed.
A team of geologists from the University of British Columbia has found that an ancient continent is buried deep beneath Earth’s mantle.
After studying kimberlite samples from Baffin Island in Canada, they discovered that the mineral chemistry of the kimberlite matches that of a Greenland-sized piece of continental plate that broke off from North Africa 240 million years ago and started drifting north. It smashed into Southern Europe, a process called subduction.
During this period, the land under what is now Northern and Southern Europe was still dry. But as time passed, the water levels began to rise, causing a lot of land to sink.
The land that remained sank to the depths of the ocean, becoming Zealandia, which was approximately 1.89 million square miles in size. It was part of the supercontinent Gondwana, which also included Western Antarctica and Eastern Australia. However, Zealandia “pulled away” from Gondwana about 550 million years ago, gradually sinking into the seas.
