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Thursday, July 14, 2011

Geologists Discover Atlantis?

The lost continent off Scotland's coast (map section).  Image Source: I09.

I09 is covering an article just published in Nature Geoscience, about a lost island discovered by geologists after they scanned the seabed off of Scotland.  This continent apparently existed above the waves for a million years before it sank back into the sea.  From the I09 report:
This week, a group of geologists report that they've found a lost continent off the coast of Scotland. 55 million years ago, about 10 million years after dinosaurs died out, a chunk of the seafloor erupted from beneath the water. It created a small continent that existed for at least a million years, covered in dramatic mountains and valleys, and irrigated with streaming rivers. Eventually the landscape sank back beneath the waves, its once-sunny mountains buried beneath 2 kilometers of seabed. ... In Nature Geoscience, Earth scientist Ross A. Hartley and colleagues describe their discovery, and offer some theories about how an entire continent could rise and fall in a million years — a brief moment in geological time. Above, you can see the image they created of part of the continent, including its coastline and a mountain whose slopes were deeply cut by rivers. 

There were eight river tributaries on this lost continent.  The original article is here.

Citation: Ross A. Hartley,  Gareth G. Roberts, Nicky White and Chris Richardson, "Transient convective uplift of an ancient buried landscape." Nature Geoscience. doi:10.1038/ngeo1191, Received Accepted Published online

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