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An article at io9 covers a recent discovery from Ross A. Harley and his colleagues of a new continent off the coast of Scotland that now exists 2km under the water. In discovering how it appeared and disappeared, they discovered a “thermal anomaly” they call “Mantle plume”, with the visualization above.
Basically, as you can see in the image at left, superheated rock in the Earth’s mantle (near the core of the planet) can sometimes create giant plumes of heat that push to the surface of the planet. When this happens, radical disruptions can occur — such as huge chunks of the seafloor rising suddenly above the surface of the ocean. And that’s what probably created this short-lived landmass.
via This lost continent off the coast of Scotland disappeared beneath the ocean 55 million years ago.
