Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Wednesday Search Challenge (Nov 30, 2011): Antarctic islands and India?


Here’s a tale that I’ve been trying to track down.  Put on your best discoverer’s hat and see if you can figure this one out as well.

I was told that not long after the Seven Years War, a Breton privateer discovered islands near Antarctica that he believed were the headlands of a new and previously undiscovered continent.  That didn’t pan out, but he did find islands  that are somehow related to an entire submerged small continent that was formerly covered in pine trees.  Strangely enough, that watery sub-continent is in turn somehow connected to the large hills near the city of Rajmahal in India.




WHO found WHAT islands, and WHAT IS their connection with India?  

You don't need any particularly tricky search techniques for this, but you do need to be willing to look around and find connections that you might not have thought about.  

Search on! 

19 comments:

  1. The Kerguelen Islands were discovered by Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen de Trémarec in February 1772. A scan around Antarctica on Google Earth and a quick wikipedia visit was all that was need for that part.

    The part that really intrigued me was the connection to NE India. Another search in Google Earth located Rajmahal for me. Being a geologist, I noticed the track that India took as it broke up from Gondwana and collided into Asia. Tracking backwards it is quite apparent that the Kerguelen Island and East India were adjacen a couple million years ago before the big Gondwanan break up.

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  2. The Kerguelen Islands were discovered by the Breton-French navigator Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen de Trémarec in February 1772. (Search Google with an image instead of text: http://goo.gl/6Dhch)

    Kerguelen's sedimentary rocks are similar to ones found in Australia and India, indicating they were all once connected.

    http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-08-lava-continents-oceanic-plateau-plume.html
    http://cdn.physorg.com/newman/gfx/news/hires/2011/lavarocksfro.jpg
    http://petrology.oxfordjournals.org/content/43/7/1141.full.pdf

    This theory is supported by a detailed analysis of the chemistry of the Kerguelen Plateau and Rajmahal Traps, which together, geologists believe, represent the flood basalts erupted at the initiation of volcanism at the Kerguelen hotspot which was then sheared in two as the Indian subcontinent moved northward.

    The Rahjamal Traps are a volcanism episode in Bengal in India, associated with the Kerguelen "hot spot" of volcanic activity. At the time in question, c. 116–117 Ma, India in the southern Indian Ocean over the Kerguelen hot spot; plate tectonics had not yet moved the Indian landmass into its present position.)

    All texts from Wikipedia.

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  3. Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen de Trémarec found the Desolation Islands, also known as the Kerguelen Islands. They are french controlled and mostly un-populated. The Kerguelen sub continent has the same rocks as Australia and India, and so geologists want to discover how they broke apart.

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  4. The Kerguelen Islands were found by Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen de Trémarec and there were part of an old terrane that was once contiguous with India and Australia. Similar spores and pollen were found in similar sedimentary rock during coring in the region. Currently the Kerguelen islands are visited only incredibly rarely by passing sailing vessels.

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  5. Breton navigator Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen de Tremarec found the Kerguelen Islands. Their connection with India is that the subcontinent to which they are attached has sedimentary rocks also found in India and Austrialia, indicating they were once connected.

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  6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yves-Joseph_de_Kerguelen_de_Tr%C3%A9marec

    http://petrology.oxfordjournals.org/content/43/7/1141.full.pdf

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  7. James Cook found the South Sandwich Islands. When Pangaea (or a permutation of it) broke up, India and the islands separated as evidenced by their shared lava outcroppings.

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  8. I took a screenshot of the islands and did an image search to identify them as the Kerguelen islands, discovered by Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen de Trémarec in February 1772. I then searched for Kerguelen Plateau and Rajmahal, India to find information indicating that the Rajmahal Plateau in India was formed about two million years ago by lava flows originating from a mantle plume near Heard Island on the Kerguelen Plateau.

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  9. Sorry, don't mean to spam you but this is a more correctly formed answer:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yves-Joseph_de_Kerguelen_de_Tr%C3%A9marec

    found

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerguelen_Islands

    And the connection to India is

    http://petrology.oxfordjournals.org/content/43/7/1141.full.pdf

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  10. Yves Joseph de Kerguelen de Trémarec;
    Iles Kerguelen;
    Kerguelen's sedimentary rocks are similar to ones found in India.

    5 minutes total.

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  11. Kerguelen Islands discovered by Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen de Trémarec in February 1772. They were once part of the Kerguelen microcontinent which contains sedimentary rock similar to that found in India and Austraila, suggesting they were all at one time connected.

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  12. WHO found: Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen de Trémarec
    WHAT islands: Kerguelen Islands
    Connection with India: Kerguelen's sedimentary rocks are similar to ones found in Australia and India, indicating they were all once connected.
    Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerguelen_Islands - found as the second result in Google search for 'Antarctic Islands India' (without the quotes).

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  13. Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen de Trémarec found the Kerguelen Islands. They are formed out of the same basalt as the Rajmahal hills in India.

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  14. Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen de Trémarec found the Kerguelen Islands (-49.34302,69.716034) in February 1772. Now part of the French Southern and Antarctic Lands

    Kerguelen's sedimentary rocks are similar to ones found in Australia and India, indicating they were all once connected.

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  15. found by Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen de Trémarec
    named Kerguelen Islands or Desolation islands.
    the island may have once been connected to Australia and India because it has sedimentary rocks similar to the ones found in Australia and India.
    found by searching for islands of Antarctica then looked at map and saw this island right away.

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  16. Yves Joseph Kerguelen discovered the Kerguelen Islands. The island currently lies above the Kerguelen hotspot, which is responsible for the formation of the Kerguelen subcontinent, which included parts of India and Australia

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  17. The islands were discovered by the Breton-French navigator Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen de Trémarec in February 1772.

    The islands are part of a submerged microcontinent called the Kerguelen sub-continent.The Kerguelen islands form an emerged part of the submerged Kerguelen Plateau, which has a total area nearing 2.2 million square kilometres.

    The plateau was produced by the Kerguelen hotspot, starting with or following the breakup of Gondwana about 130 million years ago. There is a small portion of the plateau that breaks sea level, forming the Kerguelen Islands, Heard Island and McDonald Islands. The so-called Kerguelen microcontinent may have been covered by dense conifer forest in the mid-Cretaceous. It finally sank 20 million years ago and is now 1–2 km (0.62–1.2 mi) below sea level. It has sedimentary rocks similar to the ones found in Australia and India, suggesting they were once connected.

    Scientists hope that studying the Kerguelen sub-continent will help them discover how Australia, India, and Antarctica broke apart.

    Gondwana included most of the landmasses in today's Southern Hemisphere, including Antarctica, South America, Africa, Madagascar and the Australian continent, as well as the Arabian Peninsula and the Indian subcontinent, which have now moved entirely into the Northern Hemisphere.

    In paleogeography, Gondwana, originally Gondwanaland, was the southernmost of two supercontinents (the other being Laurasia) that later became parts of the Pangaea supercontinent.


    Sources: Google maps, Wikipedia.

    I found the island on Google maps simply by looking between Antarctica and India. Then I googled the name and followed the links on Wikipedia.

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  18. Wikipedia: On Sunday February 12, 1772, Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen de Trémarec discovered the archipelago that was finally named after him. James Cook independently discovered it in 1776.

    Then searched "keguelen rajmahal" on Google and found numerous scientific papers linking the Rajmahal basalts to the Kerguelen plateau.

    “...eruption of the Rajmahal basalts, formation of the Southern Kerguelen Plateau, and Elan Bank's separation from India are best explained by the presence of the Kerguelen hotspot close to the eastern Indian margin”

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  19. Kerguelen Islands...check.
    Y-J de Kerguelen de Tremarec...check.
    Paleolithic connection...check.

    Modern connection:
    The French National Space Centre operate a base ...Kerguelen is ideally placed to track Ariane rockets launched...by the Indians from Shriarikota.

    http://www.btinternet.com/~sa_sa/kerguelen/kerguelen_history_20.html

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