A massive part of Earth’s surface has been missing for over 20 million years… until now. Scientists have just uncovered a shocking geological mystery — a section of the planet that vanished without a trace millions of years ago. Where did it go? How did it disappear? And most importantly... what does its discovery mean for Earth’s future?
Dive into the latest scientific breakthrough that’s rewriting everything we thought we knew about Earth’s ancient history. Could this be connected to plate shifts, mass extinctions... or something more bizarre?
📺 Watch now and decide for yourself and subscribe for more mind-blowing science, lost continents, ancient history, and hidden Earth secrets!
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00:01This whole part of our planet has disappeared.
00:04It used to be a tectonic plate, but something that big doesn't just vanish without a trace.
00:10And the clues that led to its discovery started in this mysterious gap between South China and the island called Borneo.
00:19For a long time, people thought the sea between these two places sat on a tectonic plate called Izanagi,
00:26which no longer exists. But wait, how does a tectonic plate just vanish like that?
00:33Alright, tectonic plates are like pieces of a puzzle all connected together.
00:38But instead of sitting on a table, they're floating on this semi-fluid layer.
00:43So, they're always shifting and bumping into each other. And there's something else.
00:48Some pieces of this puzzle are heavier than others.
00:52And what happens is that eventually, a heavier piece slips under a lighter one.
00:59Something similar happens with tectonic plates, but it's less about weight and more about density.
01:05When the edge of one plate sinks below another and gets pushed down into the mantle, that process is called subduction.
01:14But it's not just the edge that can sink. Entire massive plates from the past have completely vanished into the Earth's mantle.
01:23That's exactly what happened to the Izanagi plate.
01:26About 130 million years ago, it started sliding under the Okhotsk plate, getting swallowed little by little.
01:35By around 55 million years ago, it was completely subducted and replaced by the Pacific plate.
01:42And for years, specialists thought that the ocean between China and Borneo was sitting on that plate before it disappeared.
01:50Cool, but the experts got it wrong.
01:53Turns out, the ocean between these lands wasn't sitting on the Izanagi plate after all.
01:58Instead, it fits into this weird, unexplained gap, as if a piece of the puzzle was missing.
02:06Recently, researchers at Utrecht University finally discovered that this gap was actually a ghost tectonic plate that no one knew about.
02:16The Pontus plate. It got its name because back when it existed, it sat beneath the ancient Pontus Ocean.
02:25But if it vanished so long ago, how did experts find it, right?
02:29Luckily, tectonic plates sometimes leave traces before they completely disappear.
02:35But instead of investigating footprints or fingerprints, it's more about looking for rocks.
02:41Yeah, stones from a lost plate can get incorporated into mountain ranges and show us where those ancient Earth layers were.
02:50That's because rocks have a special power to record Earth's magnetic field.
02:55You know, that invisible shield that protects our planet from space threats like solar wind and cosmic rays?
03:02So, as rocks cool and solidify, the magnetic materials in them, like magnetite or hematite, line up with Earth's magnetic field at the time and get locked in.
03:14They can freeze a record of the magnetic field direction and strength.
03:19And since it changes depending on latitude, basically whether it's further north or south on the planet,
03:26it allows the rocks to kind of take a snapshot of their ancient position relative to the equator.
03:33Knowing this, researchers traveled to Borneo to collect and study the rocks over there.
03:39And they discovered something odd.
03:42These stones were originally from a much farther north region.
03:46Their ancient coordinates didn't match the latitude they expected for Izanagi.
03:51In fact, they didn't match any of the tectonic plates we knew about up until then.
03:57So they quickly realized two things.
04:00One, they had just discovered an eerie gap.
04:03Two, there must be a hidden ghost tectonic plate that used to be in that spot.
04:09To unravel the mystery, scientists used computer models to study the region's geology over the last 160 million years.
04:18Thanks to this technology, they were able to piece together the entire Pontus Plate in all its glory.
04:25The next step was to figure out the key features of this part of our planet that had been submerged, like its age.
04:33You see, the rock samples collected in Borneo date back 135 million years, back when dinosaurs ruled the Earth.
04:42With this information, scientists realized that the Pontus Plate was formed at least 160 million years ago.
04:49But it's probably even older than that.
04:52Although it is hard to pin down exactly when it was formed, one thing we can say for sure.
04:59It was huge.
05:00The Pontus Plate was about one-quarter the size of the Pacific Ocean.
05:05Unfortunately, by around 20 million years ago, it said bye-bye to the planet, sinking and being completely pushed under the Australian Plate to the south and China to the north.
05:17At this point, you might be wondering if a couple of rocks and a computer reconstruction are enough to prove that the Pontus Plate really existed.
05:26Well, yeah, they are.
05:28But other clues have also been found in Palawan, an island in the western Philippines and in the South China Sea.
05:35The truth is that the scientific community has suspected the existence of Pontus for over 10 years.
05:42At that time, researchers were really focused on the area around the Philippines.
05:47This region is like a playground for geologists, since it sits at the crossroads of several tectonic plate systems.
05:55So, scientists decided to reconstruct the movements of the Earth's crust between Japan and New Zealand.
06:02And because of that, the study suggested there had to be a subduction zone running through there, separating the known Pacific plates in the east from the hypothetical Pontus Plate in the west.
06:14These previous predictions were possible because tectonic plates are really bad at playing hide-and-seek.
06:23Like we said before, before they get submerged, they leave clues behind.
06:28And it's not just rocks.
06:30They can also change the Earth's mantle, which leads to the formation of volcanoes, earthquakes and deep ocean trenches, for example.
06:39But the subduction process can also mess with the composition and temperature of the mantle, making some areas hotter or cooler.
06:47These are considered anomalies.
06:50It is possible to detect these anomalies using seismographs, which are instruments that pick up earthquake signals and record the ground's motion.
06:59When earthquakes happen, they send out ripples or waves through the Earth.
07:04These waves travel through the Earth's layers.
07:07But if they hit something unusual, like an ancient piece of a tectonic plate hidden in the mantle, the waves get disrupted.
07:15It's like hitting a bump on a smooth road.
07:18It messes with the ride.
07:20Using regular seismometers to look for anomalies is fine, and it can totally help us find clues about the Earth's past.
07:27But if scientists want to use this method to get pictures of what's really going on beneath the surface, it gets a lot trickier.
07:35Not only do the images come out in low resolution, but the process also becomes insanely expensive.
07:42So recently, experts just uncovered a cutting edge technique that could completely change the way we look at the Earth's depths.
07:50Kind of like an ultrasound, scientists can now actually see what's happening miles beneath our feet.
07:58More specifically, in a region between the Earth's brittle crust and the mantle underneath, known as the MOHO.
08:05This new method is called Distributed Acoustic Sensing, or DAS .
08:12It uses fiber-optic cables, the same ones that give us high-speed internet as earthquake sensors.
08:19Here's how it works.
08:21Laser beams are sent through the cables, and when the ground moves, whether from an earthquake, traffic, or other vibrations,
08:29the shaking changes how the laser light bounces around inside the cables.
08:35The cool part is that we can now measure these changes all along the length of the cable,
08:40so the cable ends up acting like hundreds of tiny earthquake detectors spread out over a huge area.
08:47This new tech can tell us things like whether major faults go all the way into the mantle,
08:53how ancient and modern processes have shaped the continents, and how strong the deep crust is in certain areas.
09:01In other words, DAS could be a game-changing instrument to help us uncover new clues about hidden and ancient tectonic plates.
09:10That's it for today. So hey, if you pacified your curiosity, then give the video a like and share it with your friends.
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