ramonmercado
CyberPunk
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Long-lost continent found submerged deep under Indian Ocean
By Alice Klein
An ancient continent that was once sandwiched between India and Madagascar now lies scattered on the bottom of the Indian Ocean.
The first clues to the continent’s existence came when some parts of the Indian Ocean were found to have stronger gravitational fields than others, indicating thicker crusts. One theory was that chunks of land had sunk and become attached to the ocean crust below.
Mauritius was one place with a powerful gravitational pull. In 2013, Lewis Ashwal at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa and his colleagues proposed that the volcanic island was sitting on a piece of old, sunken continent.
Although Mauritius is only 8 million years old, some zircon crystals on the island’s beaches are almost 2 billion years old. Volcanic eruptions may have ejected the zircon from ancient rock below.
Now, Ashwal and his team have found zircon crystals in Mauritius that are up to 3 billion years old. Through detailed analyses they have reconstructed the geological history of the lost continent, which they named Mauritia. ...
https://www.newscientist.com/articl...id=SOC|NSNS|2017-Echobox#link_time=1485906278
By Alice Klein
An ancient continent that was once sandwiched between India and Madagascar now lies scattered on the bottom of the Indian Ocean.
The first clues to the continent’s existence came when some parts of the Indian Ocean were found to have stronger gravitational fields than others, indicating thicker crusts. One theory was that chunks of land had sunk and become attached to the ocean crust below.
Mauritius was one place with a powerful gravitational pull. In 2013, Lewis Ashwal at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa and his colleagues proposed that the volcanic island was sitting on a piece of old, sunken continent.
Although Mauritius is only 8 million years old, some zircon crystals on the island’s beaches are almost 2 billion years old. Volcanic eruptions may have ejected the zircon from ancient rock below.
Now, Ashwal and his team have found zircon crystals in Mauritius that are up to 3 billion years old. Through detailed analyses they have reconstructed the geological history of the lost continent, which they named Mauritia. ...
https://www.newscientist.com/articl...id=SOC|NSNS|2017-Echobox#link_time=1485906278