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Scientists Discover Evidence of a 'Lost Continent' Under the Indian Ocean (earthsky.org)
Scientists at Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa say they've discovered evidence of a "lost continent" beneath the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. According to EarthSky, the evidence of the "lost continent" may be leftover from the breakup of the ancient supercontinent Gondwana, which started to break up around 200 million years ago. The evidence itself "takes the form of ancient zircon minerals found in much-younger rocks." From the report: Geologist Lewis Ashwal of Wit University led a group studying the mineral zircon, found in rocks spewed up by lava during volcanic eruptions. Zircon minerals contain trace amounts of radioactive uranium, which decays to lead and can thus be accurately dated. Ashwal and his colleagues say they've found remnants of this mineral far too old to have originated on the relatively young island of Mauritius. They believe their work shows the existence of an ancient continent, which may have broken off from the island of Madagascar, when Africa, India, Australia and Antarctica split up and formed the Indian Ocean. Ashwal explained in a statement: "Earth is made up of two parts -- continents, which are old, and oceans, which are "young." On the continents you find rocks that are over four billion years old, but you find nothing like that in the oceans, as this is where new rocks are formed. 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. The fact that we have found zircons of this age proves that there are much older crustal materials under Mauritius that could only have originated from a continent." The study has been published in the journal Nature Communications.
Right, although Lewis Ashwal looks quite white to me. Oh, the wonders of being able to use a simple Google search...
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
Firstly, Wegener's work hasn't been the norm for a very, very long time - it was roundly rejected in his lifetime, and only came back into vogue in the 1960s when computer simulations made a much stronger argument for the closeness of the fit. It really got going later on when, thanks to modern diving technology, we were able to go dive down where the predicted seams were - and indeed find the magma welling up through the cracks.
Secondly - this does not, in any way, contradict that theory. It merely suggests that there is an extra piece to the puzzle that's been lost. It doesn't change how the other pieces moved.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *