Northeast Australia once neighbors Greenland: geologists have discovered new details of the geography of the ancient supercontinent Columbia.
The outlines of modern continents are a temporary phenomenon: thanks to plate tectonics, they are in constant motion. In the future, they will be completely different, others they were in the past, and geologists continually refine descriptions of ancient continents, studying rocks and fossils.
So, in Australia, minerals have recently been discovered that allow it to be bound - or at least part of it - to the coast of Canada. It seems that 1.7 billion years ago the smallest continent was even smaller, and its northeast was part of today's North America. Scientists write about this in an article published by the journal Geology.
In fact, the find did not become such a big surprise for specialists. Hypotheses about the connection of the two continents appeared in the 1970s. Then scientists suggested that in the supercontinent Rodinia, which existed between 1.1 billion and 750 million years ago and united the entire land of the Earth, they were neighbors. However, many details of the device Rodinia remain the subject of debate, and now it is even about an even earlier time.