 Believe it or not, geologists recently found a new continent in the Indian Ocean! Find out more about "Mauritia" here. An entirely new continent was recently uncovered around seven miles deep in the Indian Ocean. Geologists named this previously-unknown continent “Mauritia” due to its location under the island Mauritius. Mauritia was originally part of the supercontinent Gondwanaland, which broke up around 200 million years ago and subsequently formed Antarctica, Africa, Australia, and South America. However, around 84 million years ago, part of Mauritia attached to Madagascar and India, while the rest sank and is now buried under volcanic rocks.
A team of geologists from the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in South Africa discovered Mauritia while studying zircon, a mineral in volcanic rocks, on Mauritius. Confused by the excavation of three-billion year-old zircon on the relatively young nine-million year-old island, researchers concluded that a portion of the land from the split of Gondwanaland must have sunk to the bottom of the Indian Ocean; this land is where they believe the ancient zircon came from.
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