The mystery of what happened to a lost continent that seemingly vanished 155 million years ago may have finally been solved after scientists unearthed evidence of the landmass and retraced its steps. It turns out the lost continent, known as Argoland, had a messy divorce from Western Australia. It disintegrated as tectonic forces stretched the landmass out and drove it away from the rest of the continent before scattering it across Southeast Asia.
Researchers have long known that a landmass rifted from Australia 155 million years ago thanks to clues left in the geology of a deep ocean basin known as the Argo Abyssal Plain off the country’s northwest coast. But unlike India, which broke off the ancient supercontinent Gondwana 120 million years ago and still forms an intact landmass today, Argoland splintered into fragments. And until now, scientists were left scratching their heads as to where those continental fragments ended up. “We knew it had to be somewhere north of Australia, so we expected to find it in Southeast Asia,” said Eldert Advokaat, a researcher in the department of Earth sciences at Utrecht University in The Netherlands.
In the new study, Advokaat and his colleagues reconstructed the breakaway continent’s journey. The researchers found fragments of ancient land scattered around Indonesia and Myanmar, but when they tried to reconstruct Argoland out of these fragments, “nothing fit,” he said. The team then worked backwards, gathering evidence in Southeast Asia to retrace Argoland’s northward journey. Amid the scattered fragments of ancient land, they discovered the remnants of small oceans dat
