During its long existence, though, additional parts of Zealandia probably popped above sea level. Today it is 94 percent underwater, with the islands of New Zealand and New Caledonia as its only major outposts of dry land. These insults conspired to sink Zealandia beneath the waves. “It got stretched and thinned, resulting in a lower elevation, and it was also affected by the development of the "Pacific Ring of Fire,” a zone of volcanic activity that rims the Pacific Ocean. “Then it got separated 85 million to 100 million years ago,” Sutherland says. A few hundred million years ago, during the time of the dinosaurs, it was a proud part of the grand supercontinent known as Gondwana. Like Greater Adria, Zealandia has been overlooked because it’s a low-rider.
Southern Lightscapes-Australia / Getty Images One remnant of Zealandia is Ball's Pyramid in Lord Howe Island, Australia. Two years ago, a team led by geologists Nick Mortimer of GNS Science, a geological research company, and Rupert Sutherland of Victoria University Wellington, both in New Zealand, combined those maps with measurements of surface gravity and analysis of seafloor samples to show that Zealandia is much more than a bump in the ocean: It’s a single, continuous continent, the eighth in the world (or the seventh, if you lump together Europe and Asia as Eurasia), about two-thirds the size of Australia and more than twice as large as Greater Adria. Maps of the ocean floor show a vast elevated region surrounding the islands of New Zealand, a formation known as Zealandia. But at least one other lost continent has been hiding in plain sight. Greater Adria long remained unknown because it has been almost completely obliterated and obscured. Plato was literally standing on the remains of a real Atlantis. “That’s where the marble came from that the Romans and the Greeks used for their temples,” van Hinsbergen says. Friction between Greater Adria and Europe then pulled the sunken rocks back to the surface, where people found them and mined them. Under tremendous heat and pressure and over tens of millions of years, limestone rocks from Greater Adria turned into marble. Even the parts of Greater Adria that got shoved dozens of miles down into the mantle, the layer below the crust, continue to influence modern Europe. Van Hinsbergen notes that rocks from Greater Adria got scraped off and incorporated onto the Alps, while whole chunks got embedded in southern Italy and Croatia.
THE LOST CIVILIZATION OF MU HOW TO
Like lost civilizations, they leave traces behind, if you know how to look for them. The evidence of how life first appeared may be lost somewhere down there in the depths.īut lost continents are not entirely lost.
Analysis of ancient rocks suggest that almost all of Earth’s earliest continents might have disappeared, taking with them much of the history of life on this planet. Emerging studies of Earth’s mantle show likely traces of past lost continents.
0 kommentar(er)
