Rob Beshizza, of Boing Boing, calls our attention to "Ancient buried landscape" off the coast of Scotland"> where Ross H. Hartley, and his co-authors report finding a lost continent off the coast of Scotland, where it was buried by tranient convective uplift, during the ocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, 55 million years ago.
Scientists have found evidence of an "ancient buried landscape" that was once above North Atlantic waters, the temporary result--at least in geographical terms--of thermal turmoil beneath the planet's surface.
"Here, we use three-dimensional seismic data to reconstruct one of these ancient landscapes that formed off the northwest coast of Europe during the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. We identify a drainage network within the landscape and, by modelling the profiles of individual rivers within this network, we reconstruct the history of surface uplift. We show that the landscape was lifted above sea level in a series of three discrete steps of 200-400 m each. After about 1 million years of subaerial exposure, this landscape was reburied P.S. This new Atlantis' time in the sun was a good 55m years ago, which means we can just go totally science fiction with it.
This picture has important scientific implications for those who know about anomalous thermo-plastic plumes.
Annalee Newitz, of io9 writes an excellent report on the original article published in Nature Science. This lost continent off the coast of Scotland disappeared beneath the ocean 55 million years ago [io9]
Annalee Newitz — This week, a group of geologists report that they've found a lost continent off the coast of Scotland. 55 million years ago, about 10 million years after dinosaurs died out, a chunk of the seafloor erupted from beneath the water. It created a small continent that existed for at least a million years, covered in dramatic mountains and valleys, and irrigated with streaming rivers. Eventually the landscape sank back beneath the waves, its once-sunny mountains buried beneath 2 kilometers of seabed. ...
In Nature Geoscience, Earth scientist Ross A. Hartley and colleagues describe their discovery, and offer some theories about how an entire continent could rise and fall in a million years — a brief moment in geological time. Above, you can see the image they created of part of the continent, including its coastline and a mountain whose slopes were deeply cut by rivers. Write Hartley and his team: ...
So how did it happen? Hartley and colleagues suggest that this continent rose out of the water on what some geologists call a "thermal anomaly," and others call a "mantle plume." You could also call it a giant explosion inside the Earth. Basically, as you can see in the image at left, superheated rock in the Earth's mantle (near the core of the planet) can sometimes create giant plumes of heat that push to the surface of the planet. When this happens, radical disruptions can occur — such as huge chunks of the seafloor rising suddenly above the surface of the ocean. And that's what probably created this short-lived landmass.
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One fun thing about Annalee's writing is she has a good sense of science fiction humor. She closes with this observation.
Meanwhile, I wait for the disaster movie version of this scenario from Earth's past, which will hopefully include references to Atlantis and ancient alien civilizations.
Sarah Palin was unavailable for comment on whether this could have been the location for the lost city of Atlantis. Even though by conventional scientific thinking this occurred 55 million years before the evolution of human beings on the planet, Palin has some novel insights into alternative theories for the creation of earth.
Read the full scientific paper via Nature Geoscience