The long-lost continent of Argoland has been found after a 155 million year disappearance

Strange but true

by Alex Mitchell

The mystery of a landmass that broke off from modern-day Western Australia and drifted out to sea after 155 million years has been solved.

Finally, geologists from Utrecht University in the Netherlands have identified the lower extension – road Below the Earth’s surface.

The elusive 3,106-mile-long expanse, which scientists now refer to as Argoland — which was once part of the supercontinent Gondwana — initially drifted to the northwest where many of Southeast Asia’s islands currently stand today. According to researchers.

It has since been shattered into several fragments, and although little evidence remains of Argoland’s existence, the work of geological investigators points it to the bottom of the forests of Indonesia and Myanmar.

To learn more about Argoland, they compared it to another prehistoric continent called Greater Adria which was rediscovered in 2019. Adria also broke up into multiple parts that split between ocean basins before becoming a single tectonic plate. Centuries ago, it was incorporated into the Earth’s mantle and the only remaining evidence of its existence is the upper layer that formed the mountains in southern Europe.

The search for Argoland in Southeast Asia provided less evidence because it left no traces inside the rock formations. It took researchers seven years to draw solid conclusions as they looked into the structure of several islands, including Sumatra, the Andaman Islands, Borneo, Sulawesi and Timor.

“We were literally dealing with islands of information, which is why our research took so long. We spent seven years solving the puzzle,” said university researcher Eldert Advocaat. “The situation in Southeast Asia is very different from places like Africa and South America, where the continent is divided.” Into two. Argoland split into many different pieces. This hindered our view of the continental journey.

Advocaat eventually learned that the many parts of Argoland had reached their separate destinations, all within the same time frame. They eventually found that Argoland was peeking out between neighboring geological systems in both the Himalayas and the Philippines.

This evidence was crucial to identifying the larger but hidden location of the continent, a location consisting of several parts that became an archipelago separated by ocean basins rather than a single, unified land mass.

“The split of Argoland began about 300 million years ago,” said Douwe van Hinsbergen, a geologist at Utrecht University. It happened about 215 million years ago, when an event accelerated the disintegration process and broke it into many thin pieces.

Their discovery is beneficial for Earth science, according to van Hinsbergen.

“Such reconstructions are essential for our understanding of processes such as the evolution of biodiversity and climate, or for finding raw materials,” he said. “At a more fundamental level: to understand how mountains form or to learn about the driving forces behind plate tectonics; two closely related phenomena.”