Hello Canada – Agencies – Researchers at the University of Derby in Britain accidentally discovered a landmass more than 400 kilometers long beneath the Davis Strait, between Canada and Greenland, while studying plate tectonic movements in the region
The researchers explained that the newly discovered Davis Strait protocontinent, a tectonic block that became a separate continent, arose during “a prolonged period of rifting on the seafloor between Greenland and North America.”
“Rifting and microcontinent formation are two phenomena that are completely ongoing, with every earthquake,” Dr. Jordan Fithian told Phys.org
The researchers identified the new microcontinent using a combination of crustal thickness data derived from gravity maps, seismic reflection data, and plate tectonic modeling
Gravity maps contain information about rock density and the depth and distribution of anomalous source rocks
The team focused on how the crustal anomaly formed by reconstructing tectonic movements that took place over a period of about 30 million years
They described the protocontinent as larger than other microcontinents, measuring between 17 and 23 kilometers thick, and said that understanding how it formed is vital to ongoing science today
The average thickness of a microcontinent is typically between 5 and 25 kilometers
The researchers said they hope their findings will be used to understand how other protocontinents around the world formed, including Jan Mayen, a microcontinent northeast of Iceland, and Golden Drake Knoll off the coast of Western Australia
