Lost Lands Found by Scientists

The Lost Continent of Mu

Scientists announced this week that a lost continent, off the coast of Brazil, may have been found. Two years ago, they dredged granite boulders from the seafloor, which might be remnants of a long-vanished continent according to Roberto Ventura Santos. The director of Brazil’s Geology Service said “This could be the Brazilian Atlantis” to reporters, adding that he was speaking metaphorically, not claiming to have found the myth continent. Santos and his team speculated that the granite belonged to a continent that was submerged when Africa and South America drifted apart and formed the Atlantic Ocean about 100 million years ago, so they obviously don’t expect to find a city there.

Michael Wysession, an Earth and planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, noted that granite can find its way onto the seafloor through other means. “There are pieces of granite in the middle of the seafloor that date to about 800 million years ago when we had a snowball Earth scenario and there were large pieces of rock embedded in ice rafts”—mobile glaciers, essentially—”all over the ocean,” explained Wysession, who was not part of the discovery. “As those ice rafts were melting, large blocks of rock dropped down all over the seafloor. “Wysession thinks that because the ocean floor has been extensively mapped with satellites, it is unlikely that evidence for any major lost continent will be found. “There’s nothing that big that’s hidden down there” he said.

Don’t expect to find the Atlantis lost world, Tolkein’s Middle Earth, James Hilton’s Shangri-La or Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland.
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Real continents rarely disappear in such dramatic fashion. “Continents by definition are made of low-density rock and cannot be subducted deep into the earth” explained Staci Loewy, a geologist at the University of Texas at Austin. Nonetheless, there are real “lost lands” like the Brazilian “Atlantis” that have disappeared from view because of rising seas or the geological upheavals of plate tectonics and erosion. “Parts of continents can be worn down by erosion, and fragments can be broken off and isolated as micro-continents when larger continents break apart” Loewy said.

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Here are some actual “lost lands” discovered by science:

Pangaea

A super-continent believed to have formed around 300 million years ago which broke up to eventually form the continents we know today. Scientists now think several other super-continents—such as Kenorland, Columbia, and Rodinia—existed before Pangaea, but the shapes of these ancient land masses are unclear. Rodinia, for example, was a supercontinent thought to have been formed about one billion years ago; it’s believed that it subsequently broke apart to form Pangaea. “Those pieces are now part of the modern continents, but they have been significantly altered by one billion years of tectonics and erosion such that reconstructing the super-continent of Rodinia is very difficult” explained Loewy. While they appear stationary, Earth’s landmasses shift around over geologic time, carried across the planet’s surface by the slow grinding movement of enormous shell-like plates. “The surface of the earth is made up of a rigid layer called the lithosphere; the lithosphere is broken into numerous pieces referred to as tectonic plates” Loewy explained. “These plates move around the surface of the Earth, colliding into each other, creating mountains such as the Himalaya and Andes; pulling apart from each other, creating volcanic ridges in the middle of oceans like the mid-Atlantic Ridge; and sliding past each other, such as in the San Andreas Fault in California. ”

Mauritia

Scientists earlier this year announced that they had found evidence of a drowned “micro-continent” off the coast of Africa, near the island of Mauritius. Sand grains from Mauritius’s beaches were found to contain fragments of the mineral zircon that were between 660 and 2 billion years old—far older than the island itself. One theory is that the sand grains are remnants of Mauritia, a lost micro-continent that once existed off the coast of Africa and which was submerged when India broke apart from Madagascar about 85 million years ago. Micro-continents are shards of land broken off from continents and super-continents. The distinctions among the three aren’t clear-cut, however, and labeling a landmass a continent or micro-continent can be arbitrary since there are no precise size requirements for each term. New Zealand, for example, is actually part of a large continental structure that includes the Campbell Plateau. “It’s not all that different in size from Australia, but because most of it is underwater, we call Australia a continent and New Zealand an island,” Wysession said. Microcontinents can also merge into larger structures. For example, “the north African edge of the super-continent Gondwana broke up into slices like the pieces of an apple, and each of those [micro-continents] moved north to form southern Europe,” explained Louis Jacobs, a paleontologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.

Source: National Geographic