Scientists discover remains of a lost continent that was once part of Australia

Earth is, in many ways, a constantly shifting mystery, and experts dedicate their entire careers to tracing its fragments.

Now, a team at Utrecht University in the Netherlands has done just that—uncovering fragments of a continent that has long puzzled the scientific community.

Geologists have known that Argoland, a landmass stretching 5,000 kilometers, broke away from Western Australia about 155 million years ago.

The problem was that no one knew where it had gone.

The key to solving this mystery lay in a large "gap" the continent had left behind: a basin hidden deep beneath the ocean, known as the Argo Abyssal Plain.

The structure of the seafloor indicated that Argoland must have drifted northwest and ended up where the islands of Southeast Asia exist today.

Surprisingly, however, no large hidden continent was found beneath those islands—only the remains of small continental fragments surrounded by much older ocean basins.

So, researchers at Utrecht University began piecing together what was left of the lost land.

In a press release, the team explained that another "lost" continent, discovered in 2019, had sunk into Earth's mantle, leaving behind only the upper crust, which later folded to form the mountains of Southern Europe.

Yet strangely, Argoland left behind no such folded remnants.

"If continents can sink into the mantle and disappear entirely, without leaving any geological trace on the Earth's surface, then we would have very little idea of what the planet looked like in the geological past," explained geologist Douwe van Hinsbergen, one of the study's co-authors.

"It would be almost impossible to make reliable reconstructions of ancient supercontinents and Earth's geography in past ages."

Van Hinsbergen emphasized that such reconstructions are "vital for understanding processes like the evolution of biodiversity and climate, or for locating natural resources."

And, on an even more fundamental level, "for understanding how mountains form or identifying the driving forces behind plate tectonics—two phenomena that are closely connected."

Van Hinsbergen and his colleague Eldert Advokaat decided to investigate what the geology of Southeast Asia could reveal about the fate of Argoland.

"But we were dealing with isolated bits of information, which is why our research took so long," he said. "We spent seven years piecing together the puzzle."

He then pointed out that "the situation in Southeast Asia is very different from places like Africa and South America, where a continent was carefully split into two parts."

"Argoland broke into many different pieces. This made it difficult for us to trace the continent’s journey," he explained.

It was at this point that Van Hinsbergen and Advokaat realized the fragments arrived at their current locations around the same time—revealing a previously unknown but essential fact about Argoland.

It was never a single, clearly defined continent but rather an 'Argopelago' of microcontinental fragments separated by much older ocean basins.

In this way, it resembles Greater Adria (now almost entirely swallowed by Earth’s mantle) or Zealandia, the mostly submerged continent east of Australia.

"The breakup of Argoland began around 300 million years ago," Van Hinsbergen concluded.

And now, its ancient fragments lie deep beneath the lush jungles of Indonesia and Myanmar.

“KORÇA BOOM”