Scientists discover ancient tectonic plate that disappeared 20 million years ago

Scientists have found an ancient tectonic plate in Southeast Asia that had disappeared at least 20 million years ago.

Called the Pontus plate, the fragments of the crust were discovered in the South China Sea near Borneo island.

According to experts, this tectonic plate was once about 15 million square miles in size, approximately one-quarter of the Pacific Ocean.

It is estimated that the Pontus plate formed part of the world’s crust before the break up of the supercontinent Pangaea but it got subducted beneath the earth over the last millions of years. Scientists believe this gravitational force came from a neighbouring plate.

It has been christened "Pontus plate" because it was submerged under an ocean known as the Pontus Ocean at the time of its existence.

Surprising discovery

"It's surprising to find remnants of a plate that we just didn't know about at all,"Suzanna van de Lagemaat, a doctoral candidate at Utrecht University in the Netherlands who identified the plate, told Live Science on October 11.

She came across the ancient plate crust while studying the rock formations in northern Borneo.

“We thought we were dealing with relicts of a lost plate that we already knew about,” Van de Lagemaat said.

“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 added.

The team had predicted the existence of the Pontus about a decade ago. Their prediction came true after they discovered fragments of old tectonic plates deep in the Earth’s mantle earlier this month.

Extends till New Zealand

They reconstructed the lost plates by combining field research with extensive investigations of Japan, Borneo, the Philippines, New Guinea, and New Zealand Mountain belts.

According to the scientists, these areas were the “most complicated plate tectonic region.”

Apart from this, the scientists also found the remnants of the Pontus plate in Palawan, an island in the Western Philippines, and the South China Sea.

The research also indicates that a single coherent plate tectonic system extends from southern Japan to New Zealand. Scientists believe this system may have existed for at least 150 million years.

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