Pink sands washing up on South Australian beaches have revealed a hidden secret of Earth's ancient past.
Scientists have uncovered evidence of an ancient mountain range buried under the Antarctic ice, thanks to the discovery of a mineral called garnet at Petrel Cove.
The pink sands first appeared on the remote beach, intriguing scientists with their unusual colour.
The team used lutetium-hafnium dating to analyse the garnet found at Petrel Cove and nearby bedrock formations.
Further investigations linked the pink sands at Petrel Cove to layers of nearby glacial sedimentary rock and distant garnet deposits in the Transantarctic Mountains of East Antarctica.
Pink sands washing up on South Australian beaches have revealed a hidden secret of Earth's ancient past. Scientists have uncovered evidence of an ancient mountain range buried under the Antarctic ice, thanks to the discovery of a mineral called garnet at Petrel Cove.
The pink sands first appeared on the remote beach, intriguing scientists with their unusual colour.
A team of geologists from the University of Adelaide quickly identified the pink hues as garnet, a deep red mineral that forms under high temperatures and pressures typically found in mountainous regions.
"This journey started with questioning why there was so much garnet on the beach at Petrel Cove," said University of Adelaide geologist Jacob Mulder.
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"It is fascinating to think we were able to trace tiny grains of sand on a beach in Australia to a previously undiscovered mountain belt under the Antarctic ice."
Garnet, which crystallises in the high-pressure environments of colliding tectonic plates, is essential for understanding the formation and age of mountains.
The team used lutetium-hafnium dating to analyse the garnet found at Petrel Cove and nearby bedrock formations.
Surprisingly, they discovered that the garnet primarily formed around 590 million years ago, predating local mountain-forming events in South Australia by millions of years.
"The garnet is too young to have come from the Gawler Craton and too old to have come from the eroding Adelaide Fold Belt," Sharmaine Verhaert, a geology graduate student at the University of Adelaide who led the investigation said, as per reports.
Instead, the garnet is believed to have formed when the South Australian crust "was comparatively cool and non-mountainous."
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Further investigations linked the pink sands at Petrel Cove to layers of nearby glacial sedimentary rock and distant garnet deposits in the Transantarctic Mountains of East Antarctica.
(With inputs from agencies)
