Canadian scientists have discovered a fragment of the ancient continent while studying samples of diamonds from Baffin Island, a part of the land covered with glaciers near Greenland.
It was there that the remains of the North Atlantic Craton were discovered.
Cratons are ancient, stable parts of the Earth's continental crust.
The North Atlantic Craton stretched from present-day Scotland to North America and disintegrated about 150 million years ago.
Scientists discovered the find by studying samples of kimberlite, a stone that often contains diamonds, from Baffin Island.
“For researchers, kimberlites are underground elevators that lift passengers to the surface,” said Maya Kopylova, a geologist at the University of British Columbia. “Passengers are solid chunks of stone walls that carry a lot of detail about the conditions, eventually extending far below the surface of our planet.”
Ms Kopylova and her colleagues say the sample had a mineral signature that matched other parts of the North Atlantic Craton.
“Finding these 'lost' pieces is like finding the missing piece of a puzzle,” Kopylova quoted an article published on the University of British Columbia website as saying.
Samples were taken from the depths of the Kimberlite province of Chidlyak in the south of Baffin Island. Previous reconstructions of the Earth's plates have been based on shallow rock samples formed at depths of one to 10 km.
The research is published in the Journal of Petrology.
Sources: Photo: Baffin Island. (Jennifer Latuperisa-Andresen / Unsplash)
