The Fate of Argoland: Rediscovering the Lost Continent in Southeast Asia

Jakarta –

Ecologists believe that around 155 million years ago, there was a 5,000 kilometer long strip of land called Argoland, separated from Western Australia. The fate of this continent was unknown, until it was rediscovered today.

For your information, the continents on our planet are not stationary or fixed. Due to plate tectonics, over millions of years, they can merge with each other to form ‘supercontinents’ and break apart from each other to form smaller continents.

Geologists have long suspected Argoland to be one of these microcontinents, but there is little evidence to suggest where the continent went.

The seafloor structure of the Argo Abyssal Plain, a deep ocean basin left by the breakup of Argoland, suggests that the continent shifted northwest, most likely ending somewhere in what is now Southeast Asia.

There is no large continent hidden beneath the islands, only small continental fragments, so researchers from Utrecht University turned to the geology of Southeast Asia to find clues to the fate of Argoland.

Using reconstruction models and fieldwork data from several islands, including Sumatra, Kalimantan, and the Andaman Islands, they found that Argoland is not a single coherent (connected) continent.

It began to break up into pieces around 300 million years ago, forming what researchers call the ‘Argopelago’.

“The situation in Southeast Asia is very different from places like Africa and South America, where a continent was only split into two parts. Argoland, split into many different fragments,” explained Eldert Advokaat, one of the authors of the study, as quoted from IFL Science .

These fragments are now hidden in large parts of Indonesia and Myanmar, and arrived there at almost the same time.

The researchers also discovered that the breakup of Argoland accelerated around 215 million years ago, which explains why the ‘continent’ became so fragmented and why putting all the pieces together became more difficult for the research team.

“We were really dealing with islands of information, which is why our research took so long. We spent seven years piecing together this puzzle,” Advokaat said.

This may take a long time. But as study co-author Douwe van Hinsbergen explains, it’s important to know how a lost continent could disappear.

“Such reconstructions are crucial for understanding processes such as the evolution of biodiversity and climate, or for discovering raw materials. And at a more fundamental level, for understanding how mountains form or for understanding the driving forces behind plate tectonics, two closely related phenomena.” he explained.

Argoland is not the only ‘lost continent’ that was eventually discovered. There is also Zealandia, which turns out to be real, and the continent of Balkanatolia, which has a variety of unique ancient wildlife.

Watch the video “This is the fate of the Earth in 300 million years”

(rns/rns)

2023-10-26 15:35:16
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