Would you have ever thought that there could be such a huge one as a hidden continent? For decades, people thought they knew all about the tectonic structure of our planet. I mean, we’ve been taught since kindergarten that there are exactly 7 continents, right? The oceans might be mostly unexplored, but we’re confident that we’ve seen everything the Earth has to offer in terms of landmass. However, geologists have recently rocked this world with an astonishing discovery: they claim that they found the 8th continent.

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TIMESTAMPS:
Where this sunken continent is 1:01
What scientists found 1:24
When it separated from Australia 2:14
Why is it even considered a continent 3:00
The most important signs of a continent 3:20
Geological features of this continent 3:54
Zealandia’s terrain 4:09
Zealandia’s thickness 4:39

#Zealandia #continents #geography

Music by Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com/

SUMMARY:
Zealandia. That’s the name of a piece of sunken continental crust off the coast of Australia that was first coined in 1995 by Bruce Luyendyk, a geophysicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
The scientists who took part in the research gathered information from the last 10 years and found that this huge underwater plateau was, in fact, a sunken continent!
New Zealand and New Caledonia have actually been a part of this huge rock this whole time. They’re not islands, as we previously thought, but simply peaks jutting out of an unbroken continental plateau.
The continent of Zealandia separated from Australia about 60 to 85 million years ago. Like all the modern continents we know and love, they both had been part of the supercontinent called Gondwana.
One of the most important signs of a continent is its elevation above the ocean floor.
There have been dozens of sea expeditions in the past 20 years that managed to take samples of the crust, and they all came to a single conclusion: the rocks they found were those of a continental nature, not an oceanic one!
Oceanic floor is typically 4.4 miles thick, while continental crust is a lot girthier than that. Zealandia’s thickness ranges from 6.2 to 18.6 miles.
Continents have very clearly defined natural edges. That’s why, for example, despite its enormous size, Greenland is regarded as part of North America, not a continent of its own.
A continent that can be so submerged yet remain intact after all this time is a real find for geologists all over the world.

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