Gondwana’s hidden depths confirm supercontinent status
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Geologists have confirmed that Gondwana, a massive continent dominating the Southern Hemisphere around 550 million years ago, truly was a supercontinent.
An international team of researchers studying granite samples discovered previously unknown fragments of the landmass buried beneath mountains stretching from India to Kazakhstan. Scientists had debated Gondwana’s status because initial measurements estimated it covered only 64% of the landmass needed to qualify as a supercontinent, a threshold set at 75%.
The team created a global age-map of the Earth’s deep crust by analysing radioactive isotopes in granite. This revealed that rocks now forming mountainous regions in Asia were originally part of Gondwana, expanding the continent's area to approximately 80%. Researchers were initially compiling the granite dataset to understand how deep crustal processes relate to mineral formation. They found that granites in the Himalayas, for example, originated from a shared continental block that formed 700-550 million years ago.
The confirmation of Gondwana as a supercontinent is important because its formation coincided with a major shift in Earth’s climate and a surge in life known as the Cambrian explosion. As the continent assembled, a volcanic arc formed around its perimeter, a precursor to the modern Ring of Fire, releasing gases that transitioned the planet from an ice age to a greenhouse climate and fostering the proliferation of life.
