Earth is n’t the staunch major planet we assume it to be . Its continent - sizing slabs incessantly move , buckle , and vanish beneath each other over the millenary , all while hardly leave a trace .
Butgeologist Roi Granot , a senior reader at Ben Gurion University in Israel , enjoin he ’s describe the most ancient slab of seafloor on Earth to date .
The roughly 60,000 - square - mile opus of crust has been hide below the eastern Mediterranean Sea for about 340 million years ( give or take 30 million year ) .
That means it ’s from right around when Earth ’s landmassescame together to form the supercontinent Pangaea , which later separated into the Continent we recognize today .
It ’s also about 70 % older than any other seafloors research worker recognise of , including those of the Atlantic and Indian oceans .
What ’s more , Granot thinks the ancient slab might be a remnant of Earth ’s long - lostTethys Sea ( or Ocean ) .
" [ W]e do n’t have intact oceanic crust that quondam … It would mean that this ocean was form while Pangea , the last supercontinent , was still in the devising , " Granot publish in an email to Business Insider .
No one had spotted the slab before because it ’s buried under more than 8 miles of sediment , according to Granot ’s new bailiwick , bring out Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience .
To test his intuition that the Mediterranean Sea was obliterate something self-aggrandizing , Granot conducted four enquiry sail from October 2012 through October 2014 .
A work party towed three large detector behind a boat , zigzagging across the sea during each slip to hunt for magnetic anomalies — the signatures of magnetic tilt locked in crust that was made by submarine volcanic ridges — buried late beneath mile of sea deposit .
A normal of magnetized unusual person , Granot reasoned , might reveal the existence of an ancient stoppage of seafloor encrustation .
And after 2 age of meet datum , his results reveal just that .
" I was shocked , " said Granot , who was stuck on a 16 - hr flight when he finished processing the data point . " The picture was quite decipherable — I see oceanic insolence ! Since I had no one to partake my raw agreement , I had to take the air back and forth in the aeroplane until [ we ] set down . "
The finding could intend the Tethys Ocean work about 50 million years before scientists thought .
" But we are not certain that it is really part of the Tethys Ocean . It could be that this oceanic crust is not related at all , " Granot said , note that it rather may be part of some other , nameless ocean bottom .
And aside from rewriting textbooks on plate tectonics , Granot says the discovery " could also aid to understand heat flow in the eastern Mediterranean , which in turn will help to value the potential of hydrocarbon [ oil and gas reserves ] in that part . "
Other geologists will likely be work to support this finding , and Granot noted in the theme that the unlike architectonic possibilities that may have generated this uncovering should all be test in future studies .
