Earth’s long, lost, and hidden continent
It took us almost 400 years to find it, and mysteries still remain.
Stories of the submerged continent of Atlantis are often heard. Tales of a perfect society with descendants from the Greek gods that were deemed to pay for their ambition and therefore had their entire continent sunk into the ocean are no more than a very creative idea brought by Plato to illustrate an ideal world (inspired by historical events, to be fair).
Below the green and beachy sceneries of New Zealand and its surroundings, there is a submerged continent called Zealandia. A landmass of 4.9 million square kilometres lies in the southwest region of the Pacific. Twice as big as Greater India and about half the size of Australia. Many never heard of it, but take a close look at the shades of blue in that region of Oceania:
Discovering the sunken landmass
Abel Tasman was a Dutch sailor looking to find a large continent in the southern hemisphere, a part of earth that still sparked curiosity across Europe. Wonders of Terra Australis lived in the minds of many, a misconception about a large southern continent that dates back to Roman times. By that time, Australia was already known and as you might have assumed, it was named after it.
On Aug. 14, 1642, Tasman ended up in New Zealand. Little did he know he was in the lost southern continent, one that was slightly similar to the old myth and had 94 per cent of its land under water. A continent full of surviving islands, such as New Zealand and New Caledonia, hiding under the water all along. After a tense conflict with the Māori people, he left and never came back.
Scottish Naturalist James Hector surveyed the islands in Oceania in 1895. After studying the geological structure, he concluded that New Zealand is the “remnant of a mountain chain” that was part of a larger continental area that stretched both south and east and was submerged.
The discovery was ahead of its time, but it didn’t catch the eyes of scientists until the next century. That was when exploration in the area was expanded, BBC reports. Satellite data that maps Earth’s seafloor doesn’t hide an area six times bigger than Madagascar, once part of the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana.
In 1995, American geophysicist Bruce Luyendyk named the continent in the Pacific. His research concluded that many pieces of Gondwana, like New Zealand, found their way north to more hospitable climes.
“Zealand seemed to be a necessary part of any name, and inspired by the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, I coined the name ‘Zealandia’ in parallel with the name of his composition ‘Finlandia,’” Luyendyk wrote for EarthSphere in 2021. In the Māori language, the continent is named “Te Riu-a-Māui” (meaning “the hills, valleys, and plains of Māui”).
The heart of geological origins
In 2017, Geologist Nick Mortimer shared his research in the Geological Society of America’s publication GSA Today. His co-authors were from the GNS Science Research Institute; Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand; the Service Géologique of New Caledonia; and the University of Sydney’s School of Geosciences.
With conclusions that took more than 20 years to be found, they wanted to prove that Zealandia has all the geological elements that other continents do.
The Earth’s surface can either be continental or oceanic, all covered by 14 major tectonic plates. Their movements and interactions provide a framework of knowledge about the history of the planet. Mortimer’s research aimed to analyze how Zealandia possesses attributes that are common between continents. They established the idea that the piece of crust is continental with four key characteristics:
- Elevation: The continent is far from the seafloor, so it’s considerably higher than the oceanic crust.
- Geology: It contains various types of rocks, while the ocean floor is usually just made of igneous ones, such as basalt.
- Crustal structure: It’s thinner than other continents (30–40 kilometres), but considerably thicker than the ocean base (6–7 kilometres).
- Limits and area: It’s a thinned and stretched continent with parts that have gone through deformation (just like parts of North America and Eurasia).
They argue that it’s the youngest, thinnest, and most submerged continent of all. It started to separate in the Late Cretaceous period, sinking between 35 and 50 million years ago. Ideally, continents are separated by water. But because of Zealandia, it doesn’t mean one has to be above ocean levels. This opened doors to prove that an eighth continent, is indeed, real.
Mortimer told The Guardian in 2017:
“If you want to name a mountain, there are certain procedures you have to go through to get it formally ratified. With this, it will just come with time. If Zealandia makes its way into popular culture and onto maps, that’s all the validation that we’ll seek.”
To this day, there is ongoing research to find out how it stayed together for so long (instead of breaking into islands). There are also split opinions if the land was fully dry before immersion, what lived there, and why it even ended up underwater.
The political and cultural landscape
The eighth continent opens up some good reflections about geology and even geopolitics.
According to scientists, if it was possible to drain the earth from all of its oceans and waters, the new continent would stand out as a highland. Maybe, map cartographers would finally stop ignoring New Zealand from world maps if that ever comes to happen (who knows?). Currently, the country’s maritime territory is 15 times its landmass.
There is no international organization that defines what is a continent, and because it’s not widely recognized, it might take a while until elementary students learn about Zealandia.
Luyendyk brings out an important discussion about the way we see land: “We don’t think of continents as underwater, we think of them as places where people live.”
Continents hold histories, traditions, cultures, and all things of human influence. The largest landmass on earth is Eurasia, but because of cultural differences, we see two very diverse continents there. Same thing with the “Americas.”
“Zealandia illustrates that the large and the obvious in natural science can be overlooked… By including Zealandia in investigations, we can discover more about the rheology, cohesion, and extensional deformation of continental crust and lithosphere,” the study concludes.
