120-million-year-old part of Earth lost since break up of Pangea discovered
Borneo
Scientists have discovered a part of Earth 120 million years old in Borneo that has been thought to be lost for a long time. The existence of a tectonic plate named Pontus came to light after Suzanna van de Lagemaat, a graduate geologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, and her supervisor, Douwe van Hinsbergen, analysed geological data from mountains in the Asia-Pacific region.
She found signs of the ancient Pontus plate in Borneo while studying the rock formations. “We thought we were dealing with relics of a lost plate that we already knew about. But our magnetic lab research on those rocks indicated that our finds were originally from much farther north, and had to be remnants of a different, previously unknown plate," she said.
In a bid to know about the Pontus plate, Van de Lagemaat studied a complex region of tectonic plate activity known as the Junction Region. Japan, Borneo, the Philippines, New Guinea, and New Zealand form this region.
Size of the tectonic plate
She collected a set of data from her studies, using which she reconstructed tectonic plate movements in the area since the time of the dinosaurs.
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The Pontus plate was a part of the world’s crust before the supercontinent Pangaea broke up. To understand how big this tectonic plate was 160 million years ago, scientists carried out reconstructions based on which they estimated it was around a quarter of the size of the Pacific Ocean.
A vast ocean separated Eurasia and Australia at the time and Pontus was right beneath this water body. As Pangea broke up, this plate was swallowed by other plates which today carry countries like The Philippines and Borneo.
Borneo is the third-largest island in the world and one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Southeast Asia. Malaysia and Brunei in the north, and Indonesia to the south collectively have political control over it.
