{"id":268036,"date":"2017-01-31T12:00:02","date_gmt":"2017-01-31T16:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/?guid=88af81e98f4562efd16eb7e5ef33623f"},"modified":"2017-01-31T12:00:02","modified_gmt":"2017-01-31T16:00:02","slug":"researchers-confirm-the-existence-of-a-lost-continent-under-mauritius","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/?p=268036","title":{"rendered":"Researchers confirm the existence of a &#8216;lost continent&#8217; under Mauritius"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Scientists have confirmed the existence of a &#8220;lost continent&#8221; under the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius that was left-over by the break-up of the supercontinent, Gondwana, which started about 200 million years ago.The piece of crust, which was subsequently covered by young lava during volcanic eruptions on the island, seems to be a tiny piece of ancient continent, which broke off from the island of Madagascar, when Africa, India, Australia and Antarctica split up and formed the Indian Ocean.&#8221;We are studying the break-up process of the continents, in order to understand the geological history of the planet,&#8221; says Wits geologist, Professor Lewis Ashwal, lead author on the paper &#8220;Archaean zircons in Miocene oceanic hotspot rocks establish ancient continental crust beneath Mauritius&#8221;, published in the prestigious journal Nature Communications.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Scientists have confirmed the existence of a &#8220;lost continent&#8221; under the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius that was left-over by the break-up of the supercontinent, Gondwana, which started about 200 million years ago.The piece of crust, which was subsequ&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":615444,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-268036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=268036"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268036\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":268037,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268036\/revisions\/268037"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/615444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=268036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=268036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=268036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}