Lost Continent Discovered Beneath the Jungle

A team of researchers found evidence of a lost continent hidden beneath the jungles of several islands in Southeast Asia.

Location of the continent Argoland. Photo: Utrecht University — Location of the continent Argoland. Photo: *Utrecht University*

Geologists have long suspected that about 155 million years ago, a long piece of continent broke away from northwestern Australia and drifted away. The evidence for this event is the void it left behind, a basin called the Argo Delta, deep beneath the ocean off Australia. The structure of the seafloor there suggests that the continent, called Argoland, must have drifted away from the northeast, eventually ending up in what are now the islands of Southeast Asia, Newsweek reported on October 23.

Argoland stretches more than 3,000 miles (4,828 kilometers) from western Australia to northern Papua New Guinea. Researchers had hoped to find a solid continent hidden beneath the archipelago in Southeast Asia, but no such large continent has been found in the region, except for several small fragments. They suspect these small continental fragments belong to Argoland, but they are only a fraction of its size. In addition, they are surrounded by the remains of an ocean basin that is 205 million years old, much older than the rocks in the Argo Delta. That suggests the fragments drifted away from Australia much earlier than the hypothesis that Argoland split off around 155 million years ago.

To find out whether the fragment really belonged to Argoland, geologist Douwe van Hinsbergen and colleagues at Utrecht University in the Netherlands reconstructed the history of the lost continent in a study published in the journal Gondwana Research. If Argoland disappeared due to subduction, it would be bad news because it posed a major scientific problem. Researchers could have missed an entire lost continent that had been subducted into the Earth’s mantle.

However, in a new study, two geologists have determined that Argoland still exists, albeit fragmented. To conduct the study, Advokaat and Van Hinsbergen used software that allows them to reconstruct tectonic plate movements over hundreds of millions of years. The results reveal that Argoland was not a solid block of rock when it broke away from Australia 155 million years ago. Instead, it was broken into a kind of "archipelago" of small continents and interwoven ocean basins at this time. The process is similar to the history of many other lost continents, such as Zealandia off the eastern coast of Australia and Greater Adria in the Mediterranean. The breakup of Argoland is a process that began more than 200 million years ago.

The continental fragments that once made up Argoland are located in Myanmar and the islands of Java, Sulawesi, Borneo, and Timor. All of these islands are (at least partially) administered by Indonesia. In the case of Borneo, parts of the territory belong to Malaysia and Brunei. Meanwhile, Timor is divided into two parts: East Timor, now an independent state of the same name, and West Timor, which belongs to the Indonesian province of East Nusa Tenggara. Geologists have also conducted field research on some of the islands to test the reconstruction.

An Khang (According to Newsweek )

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