Lost continent of ‘Argoland’ finally FOUND after being buried for millions of years

Daily Express - Science·2023-10-28 11:01

Reconstruction of how a lost continent resurfaced

Geologists have located the remains of the lost continent of Argoland, a 3,100-mile-long landmass that separated from western Australia some 155 million years ago.

The existence of the ancient landmass was known from the “void” it left behind — a submarine basin known as the Argo Abyssal Plain.

The structure of the seafloor indicates that Argoland must have drifted off to the northwest, to where the islands of Southeast Asia are located in the present day.

The problem, however, is that there is no large continent hidden beneath those islands — only the remnants of small continental fragments surrounded by much older ocean basins.

Now, however, a pair of researchers from the Netherlands have succeeded in reconstructing the history of the lost continent — revealing that it is in fragments, but still exists, under the jungles of large parts of Indonesia and Myanmar.

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The study was undertaken by geologists Professor Douwe van Hinsbergen and Dr Eldert Advokaat of Utrecht University.

Van Hinsbergen said: “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 like in the geological past.

“It would be almost impossible to create reliable reconstructions of former supercontinents and the Earth’s geography in foregone eras.”

These reconstructions, he explained, 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.”

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In their work, van Hinsbergen and Advokaat were curious about what the geology of Southeast Asia can tell us about Argoland’s fate.

Advokaat said: “We were literally dealing with islands of information, which is why our research took so long. We spent seven years putting the puzzle together.

“The situation in Southeast Asia is very different from places like Africa and South America, where a continent broke neatly into pieces.

“Argoland splintered into many different shards. That obstructed our view of the continent’s journey.”

Key to reconstructing the evolution of Argoland, Advokaat explained, was the realisation that all the shards arrived at their current location at around the same time.

The duo noted that, Argoland was always somewhat fragmented, being less a single, coherent continent and more a — as they glibly put it — “Argopelago” of microcontinental fragments separated by older oceanic basins.

(In this way, Argoland resembles both Greater Adria, another lost continent that has long since been subducted into the Earth’s mantle leaving only a sliver behind in the mountains of southern Europe; and Zeelandia, the largest submerged continent east of Australia.)

In fact, according to van Hinsbergen, “the splintering of Argoland started around 300 million years ago” — and, their modelling suggests, accelerated 85 million years later.

The full findings of the study were published in the journal Gondwana Research.