Mauritius

A grain of sand on Mauritius helped reveal the remains of a lost continent.

Mauritius is a young volcanic island. But when researchers sorted through beach sand grain by grain, they found zircon grains hundreds of millions of years older than the island itself.

Zircon is an extremely durable mineral that can be dated. Some of the sand grains turned out to be almost two billion years old.

They cannot have formed together with Mauritius’s young volcanic rocks.

Together with other geological evidence, these ancient grains became an important clue that remnants of a much older continent, Mauritia, lie beneath Mauritius and the Indian Ocean.