Sunken continents in separate seas

ATLANTIC OCEAN: Japanese and Brazilian scientists have discovered a large amount of quartz sand and granite 8,000' (2400 m) below the surface and 900 mi (1500 km) off the coast of Rio de Janeiro. The rocks (PICTURED ABOVE AND HERE) are normally found on dry land, suggesting that a continent once existed in the region and sank tens of millions of years ago. “This could be Brazil’s Atlantis. We are almost certain, but we need to strengthen this hypothesis," says Roberto Ventura Santos, Director of the Geology Service of Brazil. He then adds, “We speak of Atlantis more in terms of symbolism. Obviously, we don’t expect to find a lost city in the middle of the Atlantic.”


INDIAN OCEAN: Norwegian scientists have found zircon in the sand on the beaches of Mauritius, located about 1,200 mi (2000 km) off the coast of Africa, east of Madagascar. The tiny island formed approximately 9 million years ago from cooling lava spewed by undersea volcanoes, but some of the mineral fragments are as much as 2 billion years old. This suggests that the zircon was part of a drowned microcontinent, pieces of which were brought to the surface by the lava. Conall Mac Niocaill, a geologist at the University of Oxford who was not involved in the study, commented, "The lines of evidence are, individually, only suggestive, but collectively they add up to a compelling story....We know more about the topography of Mars than we do about [that] of the world's ocean floor, so there may well be other dismembered continents out there waiting to be discovered."

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