
Kids are taught that seven continents
exist: Asia, Africa, Australia, Antarctica, Europe, North America, and South
America.
Six, if you group Asia and Europe
together and call it Eurasia.
But according to a new study, there’s
a seventh geologic continent called ‘Zealandia,’ and it’s been hiding in plain
sight this whole time.
GSA Today #Science Online Ahead of Print— geosociety (@geosociety) February 14, 2017
'Zealandia: Earth’s Hidden Continent' https://t.co/gB85focR0w https://t.co/fTa7B0Xo1P pic.twitter.com/sIZsFdUoFB
Eleven scientists behind the study
say that New Zealand and New Caledonia aren’t just island chains, they’re part
of a single slab of continental crust that’s distinct from Australia.
At 4.9 million square kilometres,
Zealandia would be Earth’s youngest, smallest and thinnest continent on the
planet. It would also be the most submerged.
The new continent is now 94 per cent
submerged underwater, although it includes islands like New Zealand and New
Caledonia, according to researchers at GNS Science (New Zealand’s geoscience
agency).

But the concept of Zealandia isn’t
new.
“This is not a sudden discovery, but
a gradual realization; as recently as 10 years ago we would not have had the
accumulated data or confidence in interpretation to write this paper,”
researchers wrote in GSA Today, a journal of the Geological Society of America.
In fact, Bruce Luyendyk coined
Zealandia in 1995 – but it wasn’t meant to be an entirely new continent. The
name was used to describe New Zealand, New Caledonia, and a collection of
submerged slices of crust that broke off a region of a 200 million-year-old
supercontinent called Gondwana.
Speaking to Business Insider,
Luyendyk said:
The reason I came up with this term
is out of convenience. They’re pieces of the same thing when you look at
Gondwana. So I thought, ‘Why do you keep naming this collection of pieces as
different things?’

Though he wasn’t part of the research
team that worked on the GNC study, he vouched for the abilities of the
scientists who did, saying: “These people here are A-list earth scientists.”
But don’t worry – this doesn’t seem
to be a Pluto situation. We don’t all have to go back and re-learn science.
But the discovery does proves useful
in predicting and examining how the Earth’s continental crust moves.
Comments
Post a Comment