Lost continent of Argoland, which broke away from Australia 155 million years ago, was found

The existence of lost lands and even entire continents has haunted people since ancient times. Probably everyone knows about the mythical Atlantis. But scientists claim that they have actually found evidence of the existence of a lost continent called Argoland, which broke away from a piece of land that later became Australia. And it happened 155 million years ago.

According to the Mail Online, geologists have long assumed that such a continent must have existed because of the huge void in Western Australia. But so far, all the evidence has been circumstantial. Now, researchers from Utrecht University in the Netherlands have been able to reconstruct the history of Argoland. They found out that a piece of land almost 5,000 kilometers long had been moving toward South Asia for some time, and now it is 5.5 km below the surface of the Indian Ocean. (To watch the video, scroll down to the end of the news story)

Scientists assume that such a giant piece of land broke away as a result of the shift of tectonic plates of the Earth's crust and began to drift. This is evidenced by the results of a structural and geological study of the seabed. As explained by geologist Eldert Advocaat of the University of Utrecht's Faculty of Earth Sciences, the picture of geological structures in Southeast Asia is very different from places like Africa and South America, where the continent was neatly split into two parts. Argoland broke up into many different fragments. And this is what prevented scientists from studying its migration. The exact location of its remains was unknown.

To reach their conclusions, Dutch scientists made a computer reconstruction based on existing geological data. In doing so, they developed a vision of how Argoland broke up into several separate, relatively small parts that eventually dispersed around modern-day Indonesia and Myanmar.

This discovery allowed geologists to fill a significant gap in the study of the Earth's formation history, adding a whole new chapter to the already known data on how mountains, islands, and underwater geology formed.

The assumption that Argoland existed in the past was prompted by a void in Western Australia known as the Argosy Abyssal Plain. The researchers also managed to find fragments of the continent in what is now Southeast Asia. By studying the structure of the known tectonic "mega-units" of Southeast Asia and Northwest Australia, the team pieced together the scattered remains of what once made up Argoland. In doing so, they were able to formulate a hypothesis as to how they managed to move so far from their original location.

It took the scientists seven years to put the puzzle together from the information about the wreckage of Argoland into a single picture. Now they have a better understanding of how the tectonic plates moved over time and how the mountains were formed. It also provides new information about climate change and biodiversity in the past.

However, the researchers point out that even the latest data may be somewhat limited, so work in this area needs to continue.

By the way, they have already suggested that in 300 million years, due to ongoing tectonic changes, the Pacific Ocean will cease to exist. And the modern continents will unite to form a new supercontinent called Amasia, which will be located around the North Pole. Below is a video of how the debris of Argoland drifted across the ocean over time.

Earlier, OBOZ.UA told about the alarming forecast of scientists that humanity could become extinct due to the disappearance of the Southern Ocean and Antarctica.

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