Mauritia: The lost continent under Mauritius

We might not be islanders afterall, according to scientific research published this week. Mauritius might actually be sitting atop a long lost continent, which they creatively dubbed Mauritia. The news was out on the National Geographic website in February 2013, when the National Geographic website mentioned a study published in the journal Nature Geoscience, co-authored by Bjørn Jamtveit, a geologist at the University of Oslo in Norway.

During the digs, 3 billion-year-old rocks belonging to a land mass submerged in the Indian Ocean were found along with more recent geological formations. Three billion years ago, a continent covered the ocean where the island now lies. Researchers have discovered evidence for this continent hiding underneath through crystals carried in volcanic lava.

Professor Lewis Ashwal and colleagues from Wits University, in Johannesburg, found pieces of zirconian crystals, between 2.5 billion and three billion years old on Mauritius. The crystals were brought to the surface by a volcano, carried by its lava. The researchers dated the crystals using an imaging technique called mass spectrometry. They found evidence for a continental crust beneath Mauritius, which would have been part of the continent ‘Mauritia’ and formed part of the ancient nucleus of Madagascar and India.

“Our results demonstrate the existence of ancient continental crust beneath Mauritius,” Professor Ashwal wrote in the study published in Nature Communications. “Mauritius and other Mauritian continental fragments are dominantly underlain by Archaean continental crust, and that these originally formed part of the ancient nucleus of Madagascar and India.”

The lost continent of Mauritia 

The continental crust beneath Mauritius would have been part of the continent ‘Mauritia’. The continent would have been a dangerous place, covered in volcanoes and exposed to regular earthquakes. “Mauritia acted as a buffer zone between the western Indian subcontinent and eastern Madagascar, and was fragmented by numerous tectonic and volcanic events that occurred in that region since the early Cretaceous,” the authors said. It is thought Mauritia separated from Gondwana around 60 million years ago.