3-Billion-Year-Old 'Lost Continent' Lurking Under African Island
By Tia Ghose, Senior Writer | January 31, 2017 05:49pm ET
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3-Billion-Year-Old 'Lost Continent' Lurking Under African Island
A fleck of iridescent zircon that is embedded in a piece of trachyte. The zircon is up to 3 billion years old, while the trachyte is about 6 million years old. The traces of zircon reveal that a lost continent is lurking beneath Mauritius.
Credit: Wits University
It's official: A 3-billion-year-old "lost continent" lurks beneath the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, new research confirms.
Sparkly, iridescent flecks of rocks known as zircons from Mauritius date back billions of years, to one of the earliest periods in Earth's history, the researchers found. Other rocks on the island, by contrast, are no more than 9 million years old.
"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," Lewis Ashwal, lead author of the new study and a geologist at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in South Africa, said in a statement.
http://www.livescience.com/57708-ancient-lost-continent-found-under-mauritius.html
