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Plate tectonics

Calling card of a ghost continent

Nature Geoscience volume 6, pages 165–166 (2013)Cite this article

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Where continents break apart, new ocean basins are formed. The discovery of ancient continental minerals on a young, volcanic island suggests that parts of the Indian Ocean floor may be underlain by fragments of a long-lost continent.

Oceanic crust is created at mid-ocean ridges where tectonic plates separate, and recycled back into the Earth's interior at subduction zones where tectonic plates converge. The cycle of production and destruction of oceanic crust means that the age of the oldest ocean floor is less than 200 million years old1. Writing in Nature Geoscience, Torsvik et al.2 identify zircon minerals on the ocean island of Mauritius, western Indian Ocean, that are between 1,970 and 660 million years old, implying that slivers of ancient continental rocks may be preserved beneath the sea floor.

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Figure 1: Mauritius and the Indian Ocean.

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  1. Conall Mac Niocaill is in the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford, Oxford, OX1 3AN, UK,

    Conall Mac Niocaill

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  1. Conall Mac Niocaill
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Correspondence to Conall Mac Niocaill.

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Mac Niocaill, C. Calling card of a ghost continent. Nature Geosci 6, 165–166 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1748

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