The mystery of what happened to a lost continent that appeared to vanish 155 million years ago may finally be solved as scientists find evidence of the land and follow its footprints.

It turns out that the lost continent known as Argoland is badly separated from Western Australia. It broke apart when tectonic forces expanded the land mass and dispersed it away from the rest of the continent and across Southeast Asia, according to the new study.

Researchers have long known that Australia split 155 million years ago, thanks to clues left in the geology of the deep ocean basin known as the Argo Gap off the country’s northwestern coast.

But unlike India, which broke away from the ancient supercontinent Gondwana 120 million years ago and still forms an untouched region, Argoland was broken into pieces. Until now, scientists were puzzling over where these continental fragments originated.

“We knew it had to be somewhere north of Australia, so we expected to find it in Southeast Asia,” lead study author Eldert Advocate, a research fellow in the Department of Earth Sciences at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, told LiveScience.

In a new study published Oct. 19 in the journal Gondwana Research, Advokat and colleagues reconstructed the continent’s broken path. Researchers found fragments of ancient land scattered across Indonesia and Myanmar, but when they tried to reconstruct Argoland from those fragments, “nothing worked,” he said.

The team then returned to Southeast Asia collecting evidence to trace Argoland’s path north. Among scattered fragments of ancient land, they discovered the remains of small oceans dating back about 200 million years. These oceans likely formed when tectonic forces stretched and split Argoland before the 3,100-mile (5,000-kilometer) long landmass broke away, according to the Advocate.

“This process has been going on for 50 to 60 million years, and about 155 million years ago this collage of ribbon continents and intervening oceans began moving toward Southeast Asia,” he said. “We did not lose a single continent; “It was already a very large and fragmented community.”

To reflect this, Advocate and his colleagues named Argoland “Argopelago.” The Advocate said reconstructing the continent’s history could shed light on the region’s past climate, which cooled when oceans formed among the Argoland debris.

When pieces of Argoland collided with landmasses in Southeast Asia, they also created the rich biodiversity we see today. This could help explain the uneven distribution of species across the invisible barrier in Indonesia, Advocate added. Source