Last month a team of scientists from Brazil and Japan took a research submersible called the Shinkai 6500 underwater to study the Rio Grande Elevation and discovered granite off the coast of Rio in Brazil that could be part of a hidden continent.
The granite samples were found when Brazil’s Geology Service (CPRM) dredged the seabed near the Rio Grande Elevation – a long seismic mountainous ridge that runs along the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
Scientists claim the rocks were likely part of a continent that sunk into the ocean when Africa and South America drifted apart 100 million years ago – dubbing the discovery the ‘Brazilian Atlantis’.
“This could be Brazil’s Atlantis,” Roberto Ventura Santos, the director of the Geology Service of Brazil, told reporters.
Of course, there are other ways for granite to make its way from land to the seabed, and the scientists will continue to drill for samples, but other “lost” land has recently been discovered, including a microcontinent near Madagascar and a massive landscape of hills and valleys nearScotland.
“If this proves to be an unknown continent, we can possibly simulate how life on the planet evolved.”
