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Hidden 'Jurassic World' of Volcanoes Uncovered in Australia

Dating to the days of the dinosaurs, these volcanoes have slumbered underground for millions of years...

A field of volcanoes in Australia dating to the days of the dinosaurs has slumbered deep underground for millions of years, and scientists recently developed a snapshot of this long-hidden volcanic network.

The volcanoes — about 100 of them — formed between 180 million and 160 million years ago and covered an area of nearly 2,900 square miles (7,500 square kilometers), researchers reported in a new study.

This formerly lava-spewing Jurassic landscape was buried under hundreds of feet of rock in Australia's Cooper and Eromanga basins, a desert region in the central part of the continent known for its rich reserves of oil and natural gas...

More than 30 years ago, drilling in the Cooper and Eromanga basins turned up the first evidence of igneous rocks — rocks formed by cooled magma — dating to the Jurassic period, around 199.6 million to 145.5 million years ago. During the decades of fossil fuel extraction that followed, experts gathered a "massive amount of data from underneath the ground," said study co-author Simon Holford, an associate professor of petroleum geoscience at the University of Adelaide's Australian School of Petroleum.

But it was only recently that scientists looked at this data to find out where the rocks may have been coming from, Holford told Live Science in an email.

"Despite all this data, the volcanoes have never been properly understood — until now," Holford said. "So, we are in a privileged position to reconstruct ancient geological processes."..

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