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#southaustralia #antarctica #pinksand
Have you ever wondered how South Australia’s stunning pink sand beaches came to be? The origins of these unique sands are more than just a local curiosity—they reveal a story that spans hundreds of millions of years, connecting the shores of Australia to a long-buried mountain range hidden beneath Antarctica’s ice sheet. In this video, we uncover the incredible journey of these pink sands, from their formation during a tectonic upheaval in the Ediacaran Period (~590 million years ago) to their arrival on the beaches of Petrel Cove, Port Vincent, and Myponga Beach in South Australia.

The secret lies in tiny grains of garnet, a deep-red mineral that forms under high-pressure and high-temperature conditions during mountain-building events. These garnet grains, which give the sands their distinct pink hue, were formed during an event known as the Ediacaran Orogeny. This orogeny, or mountain-building episode, was a period of crustal compression and thickening in East Antarctica, resulting in the formation of towering mountain ranges, comparable in scale to today’s Himalayas. These mountains, now buried beneath the vast East Antarctic Ice Sheet, were slowly ground down by glaciers during the Permo-Carboniferous Ice Age (~300 million years ago), a time when much of Gondwana—the ancient supercontinent that included Antarctica, Australia, South America, and Africa—was covered in ice.

As glaciers flowed across East Antarctica, they eroded the ancient garnet-rich metamorphic rocks, entraining the grains in massive ice sheets. These glaciers moved northward, carrying their sediment loads toward what is now South Australia. When the glaciers eventually melted, they deposited these sediments into an ancient glacial basin known as the Troubridge Basin, where the garnet grains became part of the region’s sedimentary record. Over millions of years, rivers, wind, and ocean currents reworked these sediments, transporting the garnets toward the coast and concentrating them along specific beaches. This process, known as placer deposition, created the striking pink sand beaches we see today.

What makes this story even more extraordinary is the advanced science that uncovered it. By using Lutetium-Hafnium geochronology, a cutting-edge method for dating minerals, geologists were able to trace the garnet grains back to their origins in the hidden mountain ranges of East Antarctica. This research revealed that these mountains were formed during the Ediacaran Orogeny, a previously unrecognized tectonic event that predates the more well-known Ross Orogeny (~520–480 million years ago). Unlike the Ross Orogeny, which was driven by subduction along the palaeo-Pacific margin of Gondwana, the Ediacaran Orogeny remains mysterious, with scientists speculating that it may have been caused by intracontinental compression or early stages of convergent tectonics.

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Link to the studies used to construct this video:

An Ediacaran orogeny in subglacial East Antarctica is uncovered by detrital garnet geochronology:


Ediacaran 2,500-km-long synchronous deep continental subduction in the West Gondwana Orogen:


Evolution of the East Gondwana convergent margin in Antarctica, southern Australia and New Zealand from the Neoproterozoic to latest Devonian:


Age and significance of ‘outboard’ high-grade metamorphics and intrusives of the Ross orogen, Antarctica:


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🌏 About OzGeology
OzGeology is an Australian-based YouTube channel that specializes in creating high-quality documentaries on Earth sciences and natural disasters. The content is designed to be easy to digest and covers a wide range of topics, not only focusing on geology but occasionally exploring other scientific areas as well.

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