The sweeping seashores of Australia appear a world away from the towering glaciers of Antarctica, and but, clues discovered amongst antipodean sands have led to a stunning discovery on the frozen continent.The unbelievable discover was made when scientists started noticing streaks of pink washing up on the distant southern seashore of Petrel Cove, round 90km (56 miles) from Adelaide.They swiftly labored out that the colored sand was made up of the mineral garnet, however have been surprised to study of its age and origin.”This journey began with questioning why there was a lot garnet on the seashore at Petrel Cove,” College of Adelaide geologist Jacob Mulder stated in an announcement.Quickly, they realised that the grains have been tiny little pink flags, signalling the existence of a buried historical mountain, 1000’s of kilometres away.”It’s fascinating to assume we have been capable of hint tiny grains of sand on a seashore in Australia to a beforehand undiscovered mountain belt below the Antarctic ice,” Mulder added.The pink sands of Petrel Cove revealed a secret that is lain hidden for millennia (College of Adelaide)Garnet, a deep red-coloured mineral, is pretty frequent – crystallising at excessive temperatures, often the place giant mountain belts emerge from colliding tectonic plates. The crystals function a file of the stress and temperature historical past of the metamorphic rocks by which they kind, making them massively invaluable for deducing how and when mountains have been fashioned.When the College of Adelaide staff dated the garnet at Petrel Cove and in close by bedrock formations, they discovered that it principally fashioned round 590 million years in the past – some 76–100 million years earlier than native mountain vary the Adelaide Fold Belt took form, and billions of years after the Gawler Craton crystalline basement fashioned.”The garnet is simply too younger to have come from the Gawler Craton and too outdated to have come from the eroding Adelaide Fold Belt,” defined Sharmaine Verhaert, of the College of Adelaide who led the investigation.As an alternative, the mineral most probably fashioned at a time when the South Australian crust “was comparatively cool and non-mountainous,” Verhaert added.The Transantarctic Mountains divide the continent’s ice sheet into two elements. The bigger, jap half rests on land that’s principally above sea stage; the smaller, western half sits principally beneath sea stage(US Nationwide Science Basis)Garnet is usually destroyed by prolonged publicity to waves and currents, so the researchers additionally concluded that it initially fashioned thousands and thousands of miles away, thousands and thousands of years in the past, earlier than surfacing regionally, Science Alertreports.Their investigations revealed a hyperlink between the pink sands at Petrel Cove and layers of close by glacial sedimentary rock and distant garnet deposits beforehand present in an outcrop of the Transantarctic Mountains in East Antarctica.These rock formations jut out from a thick ice sheet that in any other case blankets the realm, making it not possible to pattern the geology of a mountain vary that’s thought to lie beneath. The buried mountain belt is regarded as 590 million years outdated, similar to the garnet analysed in Verhaert’s research, however she and her colleagues have not been capable of get a great take a look at it.The researchers imagine that the garnet-rich glacial sands have been floor out of the Antarctic mountains – which stay hidden below the ice – by an ice sheet which moved northwestwards in the course of the Late Palaeozoic Ice Age.Again then, Australia and Antarctica have been linked by way of the supercontinent Gondwana.”The garnet deposits have been then regionally saved in glacial sedimentary deposits alongside the southern Australian margin,” fellow College of Adelaide geologist, Stijn Glorie, defined, “till erosion [once again] liberated them and the waves and tides concentrated them on the South Australian seashores.”It’s superb how one thing as seemingly innocuous as a sand deposit can bridge such huge gaps between area and time.Join our free Indy100 weekly newsletterHow to affix the indy100’s free WhatsApp channelHave your say in our information democracy. Click on the upvote icon on the high of the web page to assist elevate this text via the indy100 rankings