The Violent History Of Mauritia: Birth, Oblivion, Renaissance

Walking on the Mauritian beach at sunset is a humbling experience. A patchwork of colours from pink, yellow, gold, orange and red manifests on both sea and sky. But it's not only the sunset on the horizon that's humbling. As my feet plunge into the white sand, I cannot help but think that here, right here beneath my feet, are tiny remnants from another world entirely: Mauritia, a now submerged continent billions of years old.

Mauritia's history is a violent one. Just looking into the depths of the Indian Ocean reveals the extent of that violence. Mauritia was torn apart a long time ago by continental drift, and left to be swallowed by an ocean that's now littered with it. The continent's days may have ended in violence but its beginning was just as crude. What goes around, comes around, as they say.

Continental drift, responsible for Mauritia's downfall, also gave birth to the continent. It tore apart its grandmother, the grand and glorious continent of Gondwana, into smaller continents, among them the futures of Madagascar and India. But while Madagascar opted for a sedentary life as a solitary island, the Indian subcontinent had plans to merge with now-Eurasia, an entire ocean away. The path was tumultuous and sure enough along the way, the Indian subcontinent was battered by the arch-enemy, continental drift, which slashed some land off it. Undeterred, the Indian subcontinent kept on going, faster than ever, leaving behind her children. Mauritia, one of those land—one of her children—was born an exiled son, abandoned and at the mercy of nature.

Mauritia's own travel was wrought by the seas and under perpetual abuse from continental drift, in an ever-increasing sadistic ploy by the Earth's tectonic plates. Millions of years of constant battering proved too much for young Mauritia and it eventually let go. Mauritia splintered into fragments and drowned to oblivion, thus becoming a lost continent.

For hundreds of millions of years, this story remained untold. It was a chapter in our planet's history book that had been written in invisible ink. One of the many chapters that were unbeknown to us. Then, science started poking around and slowly but surely, the lost chapter was flipped through, traces of writing were observed and the story was deciphered as science began to unravel the sunken history of the lost continent. Mauritia's history would be disputed, debated and take some erroneous leads but it would eventually resurface in the nineteenth century.

The first seeds of Mauritia's existence can be traced back to France in 1840, oddly enough under the guise of a budding science that would later blossom into evolution. Renown French naturalist Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire had previously written that all living animals on Earth were in essence similar, adding that they all changed very slowly and over very long periods of time. In his quest for evidence, Saint-Hilaire began to study anatomy. A decade later, he published his findings in the book Philosophie anatomique, detailing similarities in the organs of various animals, sometimes at various stages of development, which he believed backed his ideas. Saint-Hilaire however, had his ideas vigorously opposed by his close friend Georges Cuvier, founder of paleontology, who believed that animals remained unaltered with time. Cuvier's staunch opposition prompted Saint-Hilaire to seek further evidence. That was when the first trace of Mauritia's existence came into light.

Saint-Hilaire speculated about the existence of a land that once linked Madagascar to India. But he never went any further. That same year, he became completely blind and a few months later, he suffered a paralytic attack which would prevent him from further investigating the idea. Whether he based the idea of the long-lost land on any concrete observations is itself unknown. It might have just been the delusions of a febrile and ill genius.

By 1864, the concept of long-lost submerged continents was bubbling. And Mauritia reappeared, albeit with a name that we now utter in the same breath with Atlantis and Mu. Esteemed zoologist and biogeographer Philip Sclater found it puzzling that similar primate fossils had recently been found in Madagascar and India but not in Africa. The Englishman found it exceedingly implausible that the primates, which he referred to as lemurs, would be able to somehow swim across 6,000 kilometres of Indian Ocean from Madagascar to India but never swim across the Mozambique Channel into Africa. Surely, he concluded, the lemurs had never actually swam across the ocean at all. If they had not swam across, he hypothesised, they had most likely walked across. On land. This land bridge, Sclater believed, had long disappeared under the sea. He baptised it Lemuria.

"[...] in Madagascar and the Mascarene Islands we have existing relics of this great continent, for which... I should propose the name Lemuria!"

Lemuria captured the imagination of generations of people, be it academics, writers or artists. Shortly after Sclater's hypothesis, Lemuria was proposed to be the "cradle of the human race" by German biologist Ernst Haeckel. The occult adopted Lemuria through the works of Helena Blavatsky, a Russian scholar who kickstarted the New Age Movement. In popular culture, a myriad of authors, films and games ambush Lemuria into their stories, from Christopher Pike to DC Comics, from Battlestar Galactica to the Final Fantasy series.

Science's incremental nature however quickly condemned Lemuria to a legend. In 1912, at the German Geological Society in Frankfurt, Alfred Wegener, a meteorologist, proposed his continental drift hypothesis, motivated by the works of previous scientists. Wegener expanded his hypothesis three years later in his 250-pages long book Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane, (The Origin of Continents and Oceans in English). The hypothesis sparked fierce debate and discussion among geologists, with many explaining what they perceived to be an incredulous idea to Wegener's inexperience in geology. But the observations that Wegener made—the respective apparent complementary arrangements of the West and East sides of South America and Africa, the documentation of similar fossils across shores of different continents—would, fifty years later, culminate into the more complete theory of plate tectonics, now universally accepted. The firm acceptance that continents were not static but in motion, spurred the finding that Madagascar and India were once part of the same landmass. And thus vanished was the existence of land bridges such as Lemuria.

Lemuria might never have existed but it was, in all essence, history's precursor to Mauritia. It touched on some elegant yet simple premises: a Madagascar-India land link, a land submerged in the Indian Ocean. And in science, if a premise is elegant and simple, it most likely holds some truth.

But even armed with continental drift and the theory of plate tectonics, science still did not decipher the history of Mauritia straightaway. In fact, it missed its very existence entirely. While Madagascar and India were retraced back to the ancient continent of Gondwana, Mauritia's existence was not even suspected. The possibility of its existence became to reverberate later, when present-day scientists armed with modern technology started peering into the Indian Ocean.

In 1999, the JOIDES Resolution, an American scientific drilling ship discovered evidence of a submerged continent, the Kerguelen Plateau, in southern Indian Ocean. Samples fished out by the ship contained traces of pollen and wood trapped in sediments scientists later determined were 90 million years old. Seychelles, long known to have been a part of the Indian subcontinent were found to be the tips of another submarine plateau, the Northern Mascarene Plateau, which was indeed once part of the Indian subcontinent.

Not surprisingly, those regions of the Indian Ocean which hide submerged landmass have slightly stronger gravitational fields than normal. The difference is due to the much thicker underwater crusts that result as submerged landmass adds to the oceanic crusts. Those undersea crusts sometimes were as thick as 25 km, up to five times as thick as typical oceanic crust.

Interestingly, in addition to stronger gravitational fields in the regions of the Kerguelen Plateau and the Northern Mascarene Plateau, scientists identified more regions of strong fields south of the Northern Mascarene Plateau down to Mauritius. Those fields too were probably evidence of thick underwater crusts. But were those crusts merely oceanic or were they continental? And if they were continental, could they be indicative of a long-lost continent? Norwegian geophysicist Trond Torsvik of the University of Oslo thought so. That was the moment when modern science first gleamed upon the existence of Mauritia. But at that point, it was merely an idea, or even a fantasy.

In an attempt to accumulate more evidence, Torsvik had to go back in time. To do so, he created a model of tectonic plate movement which spanned millions of years in the past. Through the model, not only was Torsvik able to peek into the past but he was also able to replay past events in fast-forward mode. Torsvik saw that until 90 million years ago, the undersea crusts were all associated with the Indian subcontinent. What this meant, and what Torsvik instantly realised, was that around 90 million years ago, the Indian subcontinent shedded some land which were left on their own to either survive or perish beneath the sea. The Kerguelen Plateau and the Northern Mascarene Plateau fought longer and harder but eventually gave way to the abyss. But there was one microcontinent that sank to its death way way earlier. That continent was Mauritia, now a fractured mass of continental crust laying silent kilometres beneath the Indian Ocean.

To convince the scientific community about Mauritia's existence, there was one more thing left to do: obtain actual physical evidence. And what better way to prove the existence of a long-lost land than to set hands on pieces of that land itself? So, Torsvik and his team set course to Mauritius, a tropical island in the Indian Ocean that so happens to be located above some of the fragments of the lost continent.

Mauritius was spurted from the depths of the Earth some eight million years ago by volcanic activity. At the time, the region was a volcanic hotspot and gigantic underwater eruptions were not uncommon. Mauritius's neighbouring islands, Rodrigues and Reunion, the three collectively known as the Mascarene islands, are further evidence of those turbulent times. Such eruptions, culminating from the Earth's mantle, forced magma through the continental crust of Mauritia, to gush into and out of the ocean before solidifying into islands.

Torsvik stipulated that the magma's journey through continental crust would leave behind some clues in the lava-made basalt land of Mauritius. Or more specifically, amongst the Mauritian sand. Torsvik identified two remote beaches out of the 150-km worth of white sandy beaches to collect samples of sand from the island. He brought the samples back to Oslo, hoping that he was also bringing pieces of Mauritia with him. And indeed, he was. Torsvik found 20 grains of zircons, a super tough and resistant mineral associated with continental crust. When he further analysed the zircons using complex processes such as ionisation mass spectrometry, he was able to show that they were much much much older than Mauritius. The oldest grain was nearly two billion years old minimum while the youngest was anywhere between 660 to 690 million years old.

The discordance in age of the zircons and the sand was majorly significant and also substantial evidence that their origins were different. While the sand were remnants of volcanism eight million years ago, the zircons were from another world entirely. Only then, was Torsvik certain about the existence of the long-lost and submerged continent.

Torsvik thinks that the zircons came back from the undersea remnants of Mauritia through the same volcanic activities that culminated into Mauritius and the other Mascarene islands. As the magma accumulated beneath Mauritia, it beheld deposits from the submerged continent and rushed them back to light and back into history after an absence of millions of years.

And thus appeared, for the first time, the name Mauritia, in a paper primarily authored by Torsvik and published last week in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Mauritia may have had a short life but it nonetheless spanned millions of years, from the lifeless Precambrian Era to a time when dinosaurs were the king of the planet. And in our recent times, it raced through the imaginations of some great minds under various transmutations. The continent now lies 10 kilometres beneath me and it still holds the secrets of its time. So, in more ways than one, the real mysteries of Mauritia are yet to be pierced and unravelled. Now is the time for the Mauritia Renaissance.

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Reference: Torsvik, T.H., Amundsen, H., Hartz, E.H., Corfu, F., Kusznir, N., Gaina, C., Doubrovine, P.V., Steinberger, B., Ashwal, L.D. & Jamtveit, B. (2013) A Precambrian microcontinent in the Indian Ocean. Nature Geoscience. DOI: 10.1038/ngeo1736.

tl;dr version (i.e. much shorter summaries):

• Ashley Hall, ABC.net.au, Lost continent found under Indian Ocean
• Akshat Rathi, SciLogs.com's Allotrope, TLDR: Submerged continent found in the Indian ocean

News reports about Torsvik's paper:

• Sid Perkins, Nature, Long-lost continent found under the Indian Ocean
• Tim Wogan, ScienceNOW, Lost Land Beneath the Waves
• Rebecca Morelle, BBC, Fragments of ancient continent buried under Indian Ocean

More information about Lemuria:

• David Bressan, In search of Lemuria
• Quantumbiologist, Lemuria
• Wikipedia, Lemuria (continent)

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Image credits: Beach at sunset (me); Philip Sclater (Wikimedia Commons); Snider-Pellegrini-Wegener fossil map (Wikimedia Commons); Mascarene Plateau topography (Wikimedia Commons); Breakup of landmass 750 million years ago (Torsvik from Nature Geoscience).