Scientists Discover Continent Underneath Indian Ocean

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A 3-billion-year-old lost continent was officially confirmed lurking under the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. Researchers discovered shiny shimmering flecks of stones called zircons from Mauritius and were found to be billion years old.

 According to Live Science's report, this is one of the earliest eras ever in the history of Earth. Some rocks on the island were, likewise, found, which are not over 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 latest study said. He is as well a geologist at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in South Africa.

The surface of Earth is composed of two sections. One is the continents of a planet, which highly elevated above the oceans since they are made up of lighter rocks like granite. Whereas, the ocean dishes stays beneath because they are created from more compact stones like basalt, as explained in You Tube.

The second part of the Earth is termed continental crust, which might be 4 billion years old. The oceanic surface is younger, and still being shaped as molten rock spouts known as midocean ridges.

The conventional thought is proposing that volcanic activity from midocean ridges causes the formation of the Mauritius' island. However, the modern study implies that a minute flake of the earliest continent may have come from the division Gondwana. This supercontinent split up into Africa, India, Australia and Antarctica over 200 million years earlier.

Now, the blazing birth of the island covered the earliest rock with multiple coating of calming lava. This causes the majority formation of the island, which researchers discovered in their recent study.

Even so, their new findings claimed that the old supercontinent of Gondwana splitting is not just simple. Rather, it's a complicated incident of breaking up. The continental crust's bits with varying sizes left detached within the progressing Indian Ocean basin, Ashwal said.