Scientists make astounding discovery of new continent that formed 60 million years ago by accident

Scientists have discovered a lost continent between Canada and Greenland, which they believe formed 60 million years ago.

Doctoral researchers Luke Longley and Dr. Jordan Phethean at the UK's University of Derby, alongside Dr. Christian Schiffer from Uppsala University in Sweden, were studying the area's plate tectonic movements when they accidentally discovered a 250-mile-long landmass between Canada and Greenland, submerged below the Davis Strait seaway that's connecting two ocean basins, the Labrador Sea and Baffin Bay.

"Rifting and microcontinent formation are absolutely ongoing phenomena—with every earthquake , we might be working towards the next microcontinent separation," Dr. Jordan Phethean said in an interview with Phys.org. "The aim of our work is to understand their formation well enough to predict that very future evolution."

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The newly found Davis Strait proto-microcontinent was a tectonic block that became detached from a continent. The researchers explained that it was created through "a prolonged period of rifting and seafloor spreading between Greenland and North America."

Proto-microcontinents were defined by the researchers as “related regions of relatively thick continental lithosphere separated from major continents by a zone of thinner continental lithosphere,” which is the outer shell of our planet.

The team suggested that the proto-microcontinent separated from Greenland after the tectonic plates between the country and Canada split in half about 118 million years ago. Seafloor spreading began about 61 million years ago, stopping roughly 33 million years ago, which created the Davis Strait.

The researchers identified the new microcontinent by measuring its crustal thickness, with the fragment measuring 19–24-kilometer-thick, and by using gravity maps, seismic reflection data, and plate tectonic modeling. The gravity maps contain information about rock density and depth and distribution of anomaly source rocks.

The team focused on how the crustal anomaly formed by generating a reconstruction of the tectonic movements that lasted for roughly 30 million years. Understanding how these microcontinents are created may also help when it comes to disaster prevention during earthquakes.

Dr. Phethean added, "Better knowledge of how these microcontinents form allows researchers to understand how plate tectonics operates on Earth, with useful implications for the mitigation of plate tectonic hazards and discovering new resources."