2023-10-26 09:14:00
They found the lost continent of Argoland, which broke away from Australia 155 million years ago, apparently without any geological trace. Continental rifts usually leave behind mountain ranges or other geological traces, which make scientists’ work much easier. However, Argoland has seemingly disappeared, and the mystery of the continent has remained unsolved until now. Argoland is not the first “disappeared continent” The disappearance of a continent that migrated northwest from Australia towards Asia is not a unique case, there have already been examples of some continents breaking away from others and disappearing in the Earth’s mantle. However, in such cases, such as the lost continent of the Great Adriatic, the disappearance of the huge landmass left an unmistakable mark. “At some point in the past, the Great Adriatic was submerged in the Earth’s mantle – the team explains in the press release announcing the discovery – but the upper layer was left behind, and its folds form the mountains of southern Europe.” As with the Greater Adriatic, there was enough concrete evidence that Argoland broke away from Australia to accept the event as fact. However, the continent apparently disappeared without a trace in the earth’s mantle. They searched for the continent for seven years Traces of the continent’s breakaway led Douwe van Hinsbergen, a researcher at the University of Utrecht, and his colleague Eldert Advokaat to the northwest of Australia. Following these clues, scientists found a treasure trove of geological information that they believed might help explain the disappearance of Argoland. However, processing them took a lot of time. “We were literally dealing with islands of information, which is why our research took so long,” Advokaat explains. “We spent seven years stacking the pieces of the puzzle.” Eventually, however, the picture came together and they found traces of the lost continent of Argoland. The key to the team’s success was determining the age of several rock layers and fragments from the lost continent and analyzing the time of their arrival in Southeast Asia. During the process, the researchers collected the samples practically with their bare hands in Sumatra, the Andaman Islands, Borneo, Sulawesi and Timor. Their astonishing results also revealed why it was so difficult to find the lost continent of Argoland: it began to break up almost 300 million years ago. These pieces then separately, yet coordinated, began their migration towards the northwest. The process took place over millions of years, which is why the pieces seemed “lost”. Only geohistorical dates associated with the various pieces of Argoland revealed that the continent was not lost following all, but was so disintegrated that it took years of research to find and connect its remains. “The shards formed a collage,” the researchers explain. “Argoland is hidden beneath the green jungles of much of Indonesia and Myanmar.” The migration of Argoland The continent has been circumnavigated, researchers can breathe a sigh of relief The solution to the 155-million-year-old mystery, in addition to the accompanying recognition, also brought reassurance to researchers, as continents that disappear without a trace can cause serious problems for geologists and historians alike. “If the continents might sink into the mantle and disappear completely without leaving a geological trace on the Earth’s surface, we would have little idea of what the Earth might have looked like in the geological past,” explained van Hinsbergen. “It would be almost impossible to reliably reconstruct the former supercontinents and the geography of the Earth in recent ages.” Such reconstructions are vital for the understanding of geological and biological processes, for example they can be a clue for studying biodiversity, i.e. the diversity of the living world, for determining the formation of climates, or even for the search for raw materials. “And at a more fundamental level: to understand the formation of mountains or work out the driving forces behind plate tectonics; these two phenomena are closely linked,” adds van Hinsbergen. So scientists are relieved to discover the lost continent of Argoland. Or at least what’s left of it. “Otherwise we would have faced a serious scientific problem.”
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