What started as an uncommon pink hue on the shores of Petrel Cove has led to a stunning discovery.The offender behind the colorful sand? Garnet, a mineral remnant of an historical Antarctic mountain vary, was beforehand hidden beneath miles of ice.Scientists have been initially perplexed by the pink sand however shortly recognized it as garnet. Nonetheless, the mineral’s age and origin have been a thriller. Additional investigation revealed the garnet to be an astonishing 590 million years previous, far older than surrounding geological formations.”The garnet is simply too younger to have come from the Gawler Craton and too previous to have come from the eroding Adelaide Fold Belt,” says Sharmaine Verhaert, PhD candidate and lead of the College of Adelaide analysis workforce.”Garnet requires excessive temperatures to type and is often related to the formation of enormous mountain belts, and this was a time when the South Australian crust was comparatively cool and non-mountainous.”The researchers, who revealed their findings within the journal Communications Earth & Setting, established that garnet doesn’t originate from native supply rocks, however they knew it had travelled from close by, as garnet is often destroyed by means of extended publicity to the marine setting.They found that the glacial sedimentary deposits of the Cape Jervis Formation, cropping out alongside the South Australian shorelines, include layers of sand with garnet which are additionally round 590 million years previous.This discovery suggests the existence of an historical mountain vary in Antarctica, presently buried beneath the continent’s huge ice sheet. The garnet travelled a protracted journey, doubtless deposited by glaciers thousands and thousands of years in the past earlier than being reworked by fashionable waves and tides onto the seashores of South Australia.This pink sand isn’t just a fairly sight; it is a window into our planet’s deep historical past and the hidden secrets and techniques buried beneath the ice.Featured Video Of The DayClash At Gurugram Society After Guard Objects To Residents Having Alcohol