A huge chunk of Earth has just been found that has been missing for 155 million years

About 155 million years ago, much of Western Australia broke off and disappeared – and has only just recovered.

Scientists know that the 5,000 km long stretch of land was formed by a huge hole in the seabed known as the Argo Abyssal Plain.

From here, signs under the sea indicate that it drifted northwest towards the islands of Southeast Asia, but no trace has ever been found.

One theory is that the continent, renamed Argoland, may have disappeared completely because it was sucked back into the Earth’s mantle – the molten layer beneath the Earth’s crust – where two tectonic plates meet. This was the case for part of another ‘lost’ continent, the Great Adriatic, a ‘paleomicrocontinent’ the size of Greenland that broke away from Italy.

However, the greater Adriatic area still left traces in the rock layers that later formed the mountains of southern Europe, while such traces of Argoland do not occur in the mountains of Southeast Asia.

However, fragments of the continent have now been found hiding among the region’s many islands, suggesting it broke up along the way rather than traveling in one large group.

“Just like continents.” [could] “If we plunge into the Earth’s mantle and disappear completely without leaving a geological trace on the Earth’s surface, we wouldn’t have much idea of ​​what the Earth might have looked like in the geological past,” says co-author and professor at Utrecht University Douwe van Hinsbergen.

“It would be almost impossible to perform reliable reconstructions of previous supercontinents and Earth’s geography in earlier epochs.”

Professor van Hinsbergen and lead author Dr. Elder Advokaat combined their findings with computer simulations of tectonic and continental movements as they penetrated the rock layers of islands in Southeast Asia, including Sumatra, Borneo, Sulawesi and Timor.

The results suggest that Argoland began cracking and fissuring about 250 million years ago, the remains of which are now hidden deep beneath the lush jungles of the region’s thousands of islands.

“We were literally dealing with islands of information, which is why our investigation took so long. “It took us seven years to put the puzzle together,” says Dr. Advocacy.

“The situation in Southeast Asia is very different from countries like Africa and South America, where a continent is neatly divided into two parts.” Argoland fell into many different shards. This hampered our view of the continent’s journey.’

The findings, published in the journal Gondwana Research, also fit the original model of Argoland, which was an ‘Argopelago’, or multiple landmasses, rather than a single area.

The puzzle that Advokaat and Van Hinsbergen have solved fits seamlessly into the adjacent geological systems of the Himalayas and the Philippines, adding a new chapter to the long history of the puzzle of Earth’s continents.

About 230 million years ago, when dinosaurs began roaming the land, the continents as we know them today merged into one supercontinent called Pangea. This slowly fell apart and disrupted the country like pieces on a chessboard until it became the world we see today.

However, the continents are still moving. North and South America are drifting away from Europe and Africa at about 2 cm per year, while the Himalayas are growing at about 1 cm per year as India pushes further north and picks up the rocks to do so.