A recent study revealed that the once-connected landmass called Argoland underwent a separation from western Australia 155 million years ago due to tectonic forces, has been discovered.
As per a report by Live Science, the continent disintegrated as these forces stretched and drove it away, eventually scattering its remnants across Southeast Asia.
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“We knew it had to be somewhere north of Australia, so we expected to find it in Southeast Asia,” lead study author Eldert Advokaat, a researcher in the department of Earth sciences at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, told Live Science.
In a recent study published online on October 19 in the journal Gondwana Research, Advokaat and his team reconstructed the trajectory of the separated continent. While fragments of the ancient land were discovered scattered across Indonesia and Myanmar, attempts to reconstruct Argoland from these pieces proved unsuccessful as “nothing fit,” according to Advokaat.
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In response to this challenge, Advokaat and his team coined the term “Argopelago” to describe the fragmented remnants of Argoland.
“Their reconstruction of the continent’s history may shed light on the region’s past climate, which would have cooled as oceans formed between the shreds of Argoland,” Live Science reported citing Advokaat as saying.
“That process goes on for 50 to 60 million years and around 155 million years ago, that whole collage of these ribbon continents and intervening oceans starts drifting over to Southeast Asia,” he said, adding, “We didn’t lose a continent; it was just already a very extended and fragmented ensemble.”
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Updated: 11 Nov 2023, 08:39 AM IST