Lost Continent Argoland Located 155 Million Years After It Broke From Australia
Also: Remains of 3,000-mile-wide ‘lost continent’ discovered on ocean floor, study says (Miami Herald)
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Source: IFL Science
PUBLISHED 3 days ago
Lost Continent Argoland Located 155 Million Years After It Broke From Australia
Argoland is the latest in a series of lost continents that have been discovered.
Holly Large - Editorial Assistant
Geologists believe that around 155 million years ago, a 5,000-kilometer (3,107-mile) long chunk of land, dubbed Argoland, broke off from Western Australia, but what happened to it after that was unknown – until now.
Our planet’s continents aren’t stationary; because of plate tectonics, over the course of millions of years, they can join each other to form “supercontinents” and break apart from each other to make smaller continents. Geologists have long suspected Argoland to be one of these microcontinents, but there was little evidence to suggest where it went.
The structure of the seafloor in the Argo Abyssal Plain, the deep ocean basin left behind by the break-off of Argoland, indicates that the continent drifted off to the northwest, most likely ending up somewhere in what is today the islands of Southeast Asia.
There’s no massive continent hidden under those islands – that definitely would’ve made the news – only small, continental fragments, so researchers from Utrecht University turned to the geology of Southeast Asia to find clues as to Argoland’s fate.
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Read more: https://www.iflscience.com/lost-continent-argoland-located-155-million-years-after-it-broke-from-australia-71237
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Source: Miami Herald
Remains of 3,000-mile-wide ‘lost continent’ discovered on ocean floor, study says
Brendan Rascius
Thu, October 26, 2023 at 6:07 PM EDT·2 min read
While Atlantis — a fabled continent said to have been swallowed by the sea — continues to elude its seekers, another long-lost and less famous landmass has been discovered at the bottom of the ocean.
The splintered remnants of Argoland, a 155 million-year-old continent that once stretched as wide as the United States, were recently located throughout the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia.
“Finding Argoland proved challenging,” geologists wrote in a pre-print study posted Oct. 19 in the journal Gondwana Research.
“We spent seven years putting the puzzle together,” Eldert Advokaat, one of the study authors, said in a university news release.
Argoland is believed to have broken off from Australia during the late Jurassic period, when Brachiosauruses and Stegosauruses roamed the Earth. Over the millennia, it then drifted toward Southeast Asia before eventually disappearing.
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Read more: https://news.yahoo.com/remains-3-000-mile-wide-220720303.html