The extensive active subduction zones around the Pacific ocean are responsible for a dearth of oceanic lithosphere older than about 200 Ma that still remains where it formed. Trying to get an idea of pre-Mesozoic ocean-floor processes depends almost entirely on fragmented ophiolites thrust or obducted onto continent at destructive plate margins. Yet the characteristically striped magnetic signature above in situ oceanic lithosphere offers a good chance of spotting any old oceanic areas, provided the stripes are not imperceptible because of thick sediment cover. One of the most intriguing areas of ocean floor is that beneath the eastern Mediterranean Sea in the 3 km deep Herodotus Basin, which has long been thought to preserve a relic of old ocean floor. Roi Granot of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel has analysed magnetic data gathered along 7 000 km of survey lines and indeed there are vague traces of stripy geomagnetic variation that has a long wavelength, to be precise there are two bands of . Mathematical analysis of the magnetic profiles suggest that they have a source about 13 to 17 km beneath the seabed: probably crystalline crust beneath thick Mesozoic sediments (Granot, R. 2016. Palaeozoic oceanic crust preserved beneath the eastern Mediterranean. Nature Geoscience, doi:10.1038/ngeo2784).
The shape of the anomalies cannot be matched with those of younger magnetic stripes, but can be modelled to fit with a sequence of normal-reverse-normal magnetic polarity preserved in continental sequences of early Carboniferous age, about 340 Ma ago. At that age, the lithosphere would by now be old, cold and dense enough to subside to the observed depth, but the fact that it escaped subduction during amalgamation of Pangaea in the Upper Palaeozoic or when Africa collided with Eurasia in the early Cenozoic is a puzzle. Granot reckons that it most likely formed in Pangaea’s great eastern ocean embayment, known as Palaeotethys. An interesting view, but one that does not seem likely to lead any further, simply because of the great depth to which the oceanic material is buried. The deepest yet to be achieved is only 12 km in the onshore Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia. So the changes of getting samples are slim, even if the overlying sedimentary pile proves to have hydrocarbon potential.
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