Mega Volcanoes Once Blasted Debris Right Across Australia

Australia's east coast was once lined with volcanoes so powerful they spewed chunks of debris all the way across to the west coast, scientists have discovered.

Giant supervolcanoes were active 100 million years ago, when New Zealand was just tearing away from the country's eastern edge.

All that remains of these cauldrons of fire are 12-mile-wide dormant craters, plus their solidified lava flows.

But their immense power has only just been revealed, after researchers drilling beneath the Nullarbor plain in remote Western Australia found zircon crystals that did not match local rock compositions.

They did, however, match those on the east coast - leading scientists to conclude that they'd been blasted more than 1,400 miles.

Milo Barham, from Curtin University in Western Australia, said his team ruled out the possibility that the crystals had been deposited there by river systems.

That's because the crystals were so well preserved, and fossils in the rocks indicated that the crystals were of an identical age.

When Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano erupted in 2010, an ash plume spread across Europe and grounded flights.

But modern day volcanoes do not have the power to hurl chunks of rock and crystal the huge distances seen in Australia.

A hundred million years ago was long before humans roamed the Earth, and is roughly when the first bees appeared.

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