Lost Continents
How the Pre-flood World Looked is a Mystery
We are doing a short video on this topic and the script and link will be published next week, hopefully. Unfortunately, we cannot go into a lot of detail in the video, so we decided to write a separate article on this topic.
Our conclusion will be the same as the video’s but be patient, we will get to the conclusion here soon. There is no particular order to this list.
Zealandia
Discovered in 2017, this lost continent covers roughly 1.9 million square miles but 94% is under water. Also, it is at a depth of 6500 feet approx.
The first real clues of Zealandia’s existence were gathered by the Scottish naturalist Sir James Hector, who attended a voyage to survey a series of islands off the southern coast of New Zealand in 1895. After studying their geology, he concluded that New Zealand is “the remnant of a mountain chain that formed the crest of a great continental area that stretched far to the south and east, and which is now submerged…”.
Despite this early breakthrough, the knowledge of a possible Zealandia remained obscure, and very little happened until the 1960s. “Things happen pretty slowly in this field,” says Nick Mortimer, a geologist at GNS Science who led the 2017 study.
Louisiade Plateau
Located off the coast of Queensland, Australia, this lost continent is said to be found between Papua New Guinea, Australia, and the northern tip of New Zealand.
It was supposed to have broken off from Australia 60 million years ago:
In August, we undertook a 28-day voyage on the research vessel RV Investigator to explore a possible lost continent in a remote part of the Coral Sea. The area is home to a large underwater plateau off Queensland, called the Louisiade Plateau, which represents a major gap in our knowledge of Australia’s geology.
On one hand, it could be a lost continent that broke away from Queensland about 60 million years ago. Or it could have formed as a result of a massive volcanic eruption taking place around the same time. We’re not sure because nobody had recovered rocks from there before — until now.
Greater Adria
This is said to be a unique continent as it is not buried under the water. Instead, scientists or geologists claim that roughly 140 million years ago this lost continent collided with Southern Europe and lost the battle.
Somehow, Greater Adria was moved underneath Southern Europe and was not only lost but mostly destroyed.
And Greater Adria is not unique. Emerging studies of Earth’s mantle show likely traces of past lost continents. Analysis of ancient rocks suggests that almost all of Earth’s earliest continents might have disappeared, taking with them much of the history of life on this planet. The evidence of how life first appeared may be lost somewhere down there in the depths.
But lost continents are not entirely lost. Like lost civilizations, they leave traces behind, if you know how to look for them. Van Hinsbergen notes that rocks from Greater Adria got scraped off and incorporated into the Alps, while whole chunks got embedded in southern Italy and Croatia. 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.
Under tremendous heat and pressure and over tens of millions of years, limestone rocks from Greater Adria turned into marble. Friction between Greater Adria and Europe then pulled the sunken rocks back to the surface, where people found them and mined them. “That’s where the marble came from that the Romans and the Greeks used for their temples,” van Hinsbergen says.
Argoland
Argoland is said to have been part of the super continent Gondwana, however, like many other ‘lost’ continents, it splintered off and was destroyed over time. This event was said to have taken place about 155 million years ago.
Its location is said to be between Australia and Southeast Asia. Its size is 3100 miles long, so it should be easy to find if it existed at all.
Argoland couldn’t be found above or below the ocean. “If continents can dive into the mantle and disappear entirely, without leaving a geological trace at the Earth’s surface, then we wouldn’t have much of an idea of what the Earth could have looked like in the geological past,” said Douwe van Hinsbergen, study co-author. “It would be almost impossible to create reliable reconstructions of former supercontinents and the Earth’s geography in foregone eras.”
But van Hinsbergen and colleague Eldert Advokaat didn’t give up the Argoland search — after all, they knew it existed, thanks to the basin hidden deep below western Australia. “The structure of the seafloor shows that this continent must have drifted off to the northwest,” the researchers wrote, “and must have ended up where the islands of Southeast Asia are located today.”
Still, with so many islands, Advokaat said that the team was having trouble fitting the puzzle together. “The situation in Southeast Asia is very different from places like Africa and South America, where a continent broke neatly into two pieces,” he said. “Argoland splintered into many different shards. That obstructed our view of the continent’s journey.”
Doggerland
This lost continent is said to have connected Great Britain, Ireland, and Northern Europe, including Scandinavia. What makes it different from other lost continents is the discovery of human and animal remains in this area now buried under the sea.
Several dramatic new archaeological finds have given us clues to the extent to which these drowned landscapes are preserved beneath the sea. These include a Neanderthal skull fragment from the Zeeland Ridges off the coast of the Netherlands and a collection of 75 Neanderthal stone tools and animal remains from off the coast of East Anglia, both dating to the Middle Palaeolithic — some 50,000 to 300,000 years ago.
Another development relates to work by researchers at the University of Birmingham that uses seismic reflection data gathered by the offshore oil and gas industry at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. Using this information, archaeologists have been able to map the surviving prehistoric landscapes beneath the North Sea silts. Hills, rivers, streams, estuaries, lakes, and marshes can now be identified.
Recent projects supported by English Heritage, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and seismic survey company PGS have mapped a previously unseen Mesolithic country of more than 45,000 km2, about the size of the Netherlands.
Returning to the Storrega Tsunami, no doubt this was a truly catastrophic event, and certainly a major event that played out toward the end of Doggerland’s history. But the truth was that Doggerland had been slowly submerging for thousands of years. The heartland of north-west Europe would have been constantly shrinking, in a way that would have been obvious to its inhabitants. Sometimes slowly, and on occasions terrifyingly quickly, the sea inevitably reclaimed ancestral hunting grounds, campsites, and landmarks.
Mu
Last but not least in this list. This is a lost continent that was supposed to have Hawaii, Easter Island, Tongas, and Caroline Islands as its outermost boundaries. That covers a large area of the Pacific Ocean.
Enter the long-lost continent of Lemuria, also known as Mu — a vast landmass that, according to believers, existed in the Pacific Ocean 50,000 to 12,000 years ago.
Proponents of the theory say that it stretched from Hawaii in the north to Easter Island in the southeast to Micronesia in the west.
They also posit that it was home to an advanced civilization, called the Naacal, who built large cities across it, as well as colonies beyond its borders.
At its peak, they claim, Mu was home to some 64 million people.
However, sometime towards the end of the last Ice Age, the entire continent — and its sophisticated peoples — were consumed by a cataclysmic event.
This disaster plunged Mu and the Nascal down to the depths of the sea, sealing their doom and blocking their entry to the annals of history.
That is, again, according to those who believe that they existed. And we should stress that there’s no real proof that they ever did.
Conclusion
In most cases, we do not have any problem with the idea of lost continents. We do have a problem that some of these lost land masses were moving, buried under other land masses, and used to build mountains.
We also have a problem with the dating of these continents. Per our usual argumentative point, there is no way to verify the claims of the conclusions found in the linked articles, especially concerning their dating.
However, the reason we do not have a problem with the sunken lost continents is because those land masses add to the ever-growing physical evidence for Noah’s global flood.
There is no other explanation for their existence or location. It is also the only verifiable explanation around. So we would accept Zealander, Mu, and Doggerland as additional dry land for the pre-flood world, but that is just about it.
The Great Adria probably was not a separate continent from Zealandia or ancient Australia. We do not accept Gondwana as a super continent, as that cannot be verified either.
How the pre-flood world looked is a mystery we will never solve.
