Lost continent discovered after 155 million years as 3,000-mile-wide ‘missing piece’ is spotted at bottom of ocean
A LOST piece of land that broke off and disappeared to the bottom of the ocean 155 million years ago has been located.
The 3,000-mile wide land named “Argoland” is believed to have detached off of Australia and was found deep in the Indian Ocean.
It is said to have broken off during the continental drifts that occurred during the Jurassic period.
The findings were made by Geologists Eldert Advokaat and Douwe van Hinsbergen of Utrecht University in the Netherlands and published in the Gondwana Research, per a release.
The geologists noted that Argoland was extremely hard to find.
They believe that it broke off from Australia and then drifted toward Southeast Asia.
It was also impossible to prove it existed until now.
The geologists believe fragments of the land started to break off 300 million years ago and they have been trying to piece them together over the past few years.
However, there is also a void area off of Australia called the Argo Abyssal Plain which kept geologists motivated that something must exist.
When they found the 3,000-mile-wide missing piece of land, they were finally able to piece together enough evidence to prove it was real.
The Argo Abyssal is what helped the geologist find Argoland.
“If continents can dive into the mantle and disappear entirely, without leaving a geological trace at the earth’s surface, then we wouldn’t have much of an idea of what the earth could have looked in the geological past,” Hinsbergen said, per a release.
“Those reconstructions are vital for our understanding of processes like the evolution of biodiversity and climate, or for finding raw materials.
“And at a more fundamental level: for understanding how mountains are formed or for working out the driving forces behind plate tectonics; two phenomena that are closely related.”
The geologist added that if Argoland was not able to be found and identified it would have led to a larger scientific problem of disappearing into the mantle.
But that was proven wrong.
“Otherwise, we would have been faced with a major scientific problem,” they explained, per the release.