A lost continent where small dinosaurs and lizards hunted among giant ferns and primitive trees has been discovered in the Indian Ocean.
Now more than half a mile below the sea, the Kerguelen Plateau was once covered in swamps and rivers, according to scientists who have been drilling into it for soil and rock samples.
"It was exciting to discover wood fragments, seeds, spores and pollen in ancient sediments," said Dr Leah Moore, a physical volcanologist from the University of Canberra in Australia.
For more than a decade scientists suspected that the Kerguelen Bank, marked on maps as a comparatively shallow area in the ocean 2,500 miles south-west of Perth in Australia and north of the Antarctic continent, was part of an ancient land mass.
An expedition using the world's largest research vessel, Joides Resolution, which is designed to extract cores of sediment from the ocean floor, proved conclusively that a land mass one third the size of Australia was once densely covered in vegetation and sank into the sea about 10 million years ago. Rock cores revealed types of rock that might be expected near active volcanoes as well as sedimentary rocks caused by river erosion, similar to those found in Australia and India.
The survey concluded that the land was first thrown up 110 million years ago and may have sunk and risen again three times before finally disappearing. Scientists once speculated that the lost land might be a chunk that had broken off Australia, Antarctica or India as the continental plates moved about to create the current world land masses. But the core samples indicate that this is wrong.
Despite the excitement it would cause, scientists are hoping that Kerguelan does not repeat the trick and reappear.
A vast volcanic eruption or a dust cloud caused by a huge meteor collision is thought to be one of the main reasons for the loss of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. If the lost plateau were to reemerge it would be on account of an eruption so large it would block out the sun.
With memories of killer hurricanes still fresh, another storm season could be on tap for the Caribbean and south-east US coasts this year. The 1999 season, which officially starts on June 1st, is likely to see more than the usual 10 tropical storms and six hurricanes, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has said.