The idea of vanished islands and hidden continents has captured the imagination of scientists for centuries. The question whether the imaginary lost continent Atlantis, which according to the Greek philosopher Plato (350 BC) sunk in the Atlantic Ocean around 9600 B.C, ever existed, has also fascinated people. For me, the lost or hidden continent of Atlantis is simply unscientific and is more in the domain of fiction than reality.

There are also many tales within the Pacific region… Tales written by pseudoscientists who bend, distort and selectively cite isolated scientific data and explanations to support their far-fetched hypotheses. During geological times, small islands have indeed emerged and others vanished, especially in the Pacific Ocean, with the rise and fall of sea level. This is a scientific truth.

However, saying that continents have vanished is a matter for the fancy. It is the creation of mythmakers who sometimes just scratch the surface gloss of reality and come forward with tales cemented with human imagination.

This brings me to the series of articles recently published regarding the existence of a micro continent under the edifice of volcanic Mauritius. Many of my fellow Earth scientists have always argued that myths and fictions sometimes contain coded grains of truth. The isolated fact cited in the articles that led to the argument that a microcontinent lies below Mauritius is the presence of a fleck of zircon discovered among coral sands or embedded in the trachyte rocks of Piton-du-Milieu or Mt. Camizard, which are not basaltic mountains but of trachytic origin.

For information, these mountains, together with Mt. Lasselle, were formed when the central volcanic dome of Mauritius collapsed some 5.5 million years ago to form our caldera and mountain rims. While subsiding, salic materials were ejected and these mountains were formed in contrast with the rest of our mountains which were formed by different lava flows.

A deep-sea geophysical expedition of the ocean floor near Mauritius and Rodrigues was undertaken by  Centre national de la recherché scientifique’s (CNRS) scientists from the Universite de Bretagne occidentale, in January 1999 and June 2000, using the research ship L’Atalante. I was one of the invited guests to join the team but could not make it. The mission was to study the ocean crust in the Mascarene region in terms of composition and magnetism; and obtain a clearer idea of the base upon which Mauritius, Reunion and Rodrigues have emerged.

One of the results was that the ocean crust in the region of Latitude 19˚and 20˚South, near Reunion, Mauritius and Rodrigues ranges from 9 million years to 1.6 million years before present and that the sea floor is spreading at a rate of 4.5 cm/ year. No continental rock specimen other than those of magmatic origin were found.

As I have mentioned earlier, the articles on the zircon crystals issue does contain a coded grain of truth. This is that the Indian Ocean did not exist around 220 million years ago when there was one large ocean called Panthalassa which dominated the Earth’s surface. The mega continent of Gondwana with the land masses of Africa cum Madagascar, the Deccan portion of India, Antarctica and Australia locked together started to break around 200 million years ago. Antarctica drifted towards the south, Australia east, Madagascar splitting from Africa to form the Mozambique Channel and the long curved ride of the Deccan of India which bumped against the Asian continent to lift the Himalayas and formed the present shape of India.

The path which the Deccan took was further north of the Mascarene Islands. During the ride, the Deccan left behind portions of continental blocks and this is how the Seychelles emerged as micro continental islands with granitic rocks.

The geological built up of Mauritius is different. Mauritius has been geo-structurally built up over an isolated guyot (piedestal) by magma plumes. To say that chunks of continental land had sunk below the crust is geo-physically incorrect as density increases from the sea floor surface downwards. One element of truth may be that zircon crystals are to be found in deep earth crust and that they might have been carried upwards during the construction of Mauritius by magma plumes.

The presence of isolated cases of zircon crystals in beach coral sands or in trachyte rocks are not strong arguments to prove the existence of a “lost continent” below Mauritius as the French would say “une hirondelle ne fait pas le printemps”.

If a continental fragment known as Mauritia did exist in the past, then the tale that Giants who once roamed the Capricorn sea in search of the sunken continent of Lemuria in the region of Mauritius would hold. It is not necessary to stretch our intellectual muscles to prove the existence of such legends as they simply did not exist. The articles, however, have opened avenues for further deep ocean crust geophysical investigations which would take millions in terms of US $ and in time.