Ancient lost continent discovered lounging on Mauritian beach Fragments of an ancient microcontinent lie beneath holiday destinations Mauritius and Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean, experts say. The pair of isles are thought to sit on top of the hidden continent, dubbed Mauritia by scientists. The boffins believe the splinter of buried land became a separate landmass 60 million years …
The article conflates two supercontinents. Gondwana is the southern fragment of the Pangaea supercontinent, not part of Rodinia.
And Mantle plumes are only thought to be a partial explanation for continental breakup. They also appear to disintegrate when they get too big as the Mantle beneath their interiors becomes increasingly insulated, making them weaker. At the same time, large oceanic plates eventually cool and begin to subduct, pulling the continental plate apart.
Strictly they were all part of Rodinia as it was a previous supercontinent that significantly predates Pangaea...
But yeah, the article was confused and frankly whatever press release this lot and the beeb have picked up on was probably equally as confused because Rodinia was supposed to have broken up about 750 million years ago, not 80, so this landmass was likely also part of the other supercontinent(s) in between.
It probably sounds boring if you just say "sunken landmass with rock dating from Proterozoic times discovered".
The age of the zircon grains puts them in Rodinia. But the final breakup was of Gondwana.
As others have said, a confused Reg report.
But it is a part of their science coverage - El Reg is more than a computer trade paper. In my opinion (phrase inserted for legal CYA) their science coverage is less dumbed down than the BBC and infinitely more understanding than the Telegraph.
Atlantis was in the Atlantic, and Mu is just another name for Lemuria - in the Pacific, at least according to James Churchward.
However, the original Lemuria, hypothesized by Haeckel, was in the Indian Ocean, so I guess that's what a lost continent abutting Madagascar would have to be. And Madagascar is where the last surviving population of lemurs is.
I've always thought that Lemuria was Zealandia, the massive V-shaped sunken continent east of Australia, of which New Zealand, New Caledonia, Fiji and Vanuatu are the tops of the highest mountain ranges. It's easily visible on Google Earth, or any topographic ocean-floor map of the southwest Pacific.
With all his world domination grabbing plans, Blofeld and his cat still depend on a Hayes modem for their communication needs? This can't be right.
Of course it's not right. Any true Hayes-modem nerd knows the "+++" is the Hayes escape sequence, while "No carrier" (properly in block capitals) was the message displayed if the carrier was lost. The Cat is confusing two Hayes-based jokes. One is where you posted something along the lines of
+++ATH0
to indicate you were hanging up - roughly an '80s equivalent of "tl;dr" or other "I'm not paying attention to you" sign-off messages. The other was to write some simulated line noise followed by the no-carrier message, as in:
!@#&^$lxkh$^NO CARRIER
to imply that some fell agency had terminated your connection, with prejudice.
This leads me to suspect that the Cat is only trying to make us think he's using a Hayes modem, to lure us into a false sense of secur%^&*(NO CARRIER
Atlantis was beyond the pillars of Hercules according to Plato. While Gibralter and Africa are now often referred to as pillars of Hercules they were then named the gates (pillars) of Cades which was as far a Hercules went on his hols. There is no reason to say that they were the pillars of Hercules named by Plato while Thera/Santorini fits so many more requirements for being Atlantis - like existing for one.
"A group of geoboffins now think that further fragments of Mauritia exist below the waves"
If Ian Duncan Smith had his way that line would read A group of shelf stackers....
I can see a number of neologisms in the hatching: bioboffins, theoboffins, physioboffins, technoboffins, psychoboffins, socioboffins, anthropoboffins, ecoboffins, archaeoboffins.
http://www.morewords.com/most-common-ends-with/ology/
When will the madness stop?
I visited Thera and Crete as a spotty youth, and the smoking mini dome in the centre of the big hole at Thera convinced me that it had been a pretty big explosion. The mess it made of Crete was still visible at Knossos when I was there, because they'd just found a few spectacularly decorated sections of the palace under about 4 metres of solidified ash deposits. The Beeb like to dress up their archeology output with hokey pop-science and gosh! wow! gumpspeak, but the Thera/Crete/Atlantis theory has been common currency in most of Europe for the best part of fifty years.
There's no reason why other island dwelling races couldn't have created civilisations based on sea trade in other strategic island chains across the globe, and similarly exploited the flow of of knowledge, craftsmanship, and evolving technology. Maybe they even chose volcanic islands as a base because of the free heat and hot water, as well as the fertility of the surrounding seas. We can only guess at their motives, which is why pop science is so relentlessly hyperbolic.
Our warped sense of European history often precludes the technical genius of eastern cultures, but it stands to reason that an island nation trading freely with the more technically and artistically developed cultures of the east would soon find commercial advantages in the exchange of knowledge and artefacts. This is how civilisations evolve, and then vanish when they eventually become fearful of outside influence and learning. It's entirely possible that the Minoans became isolated groups of refugees whose influence continued to be felt, but in a more subtle and widely dispersed fashion.
Mu may well have been a trading hub of some description, but without a bit more evidence, and some archeological or historic literary clues to its disappearance, it's just a pitch. So let's send the Beeb to make a speculative pop-archeolgy series.
"The boffins did not say whether the lost continent was that of Atlantis, Mu or Lemuria."
Well, even assuming the legends might have some basis in truth, it won't be one of them, because this chunk of lost land is 60 million years old, pre-cambrian....
....so, that'd be pre-human days then. By quite some margin.
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