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The researchers have discovered a hidden continent on Earth, but it is not Atlantis. They found it by reconstructing the evolution of the complex geology of the Mediterranean region, which rises with mountain ranges and troughs with seas going from Spain to Iran.
The continent is called Greater Adria. It is the size of Greenland and it left North Africa to be buried under southern Europe about 140 million years ago.
And chances are, you've been there without even knowing it.
"Forget Atlantis", said
Douwe van Hinsbergen
, author and professor of global tectonics and paleogeography at the University of Utrecht. "Without knowing it, many tourists spend their holidays every year on the lost continent of the Great Adria."
The study was published this month in the journal
Gondwana Research
.
Research on the evolution of mountain ranges can show the evolution of continents.
"Most of the mountain ranges we studied came from a single continent that separated from North Africa more than 200 million years ago," he said. van Hinsbergen. "The only remaining part of this continent is a band that goes from Turin through the Adriatic Sea up to the heel of the boot that forms Italy."
Geologists call this area "Adria". The researchers in this study refer to the previously unknown continent as Grand Adria.
In the Mediterranean region, geologists have a different understanding of plate tectonics. Plate tectonics is the theory that underlies the formation of oceans and continents. For other regions of the Earth, this theory suggests that plates do not deform when they move side by side in areas with large fault lines.
But Turkey and the Mediterranean are totally different.
"It's just a geological mess: everything is bent, broken and piled up," van Hinsbergen said. "Compared to that, the Himalayas, for example, is a fairly simple system, you can follow several major fault lines over a distance of more than 2,000 kilometers."
In the case of Grand Adria, most was under water, covered by shallow seas, coral reefs and sediments. The sediments formed rocks and these were scraped as barnacles when the Great Adriatic was forced under the cloak of Southern Europe. These torn rocks have become mountain ranges in these regions: the Alps, the Apennines, the Balkans, Greece and Turkey.
"Subduction, diving from one plate under the other, is the fundamental way to form mountain ranges," said Van Hinsbergen. "Our research has provided a lot of information, also on volcanism and earthquakes, that we already apply elsewhere.You can even predict, to some extent, what a given area will look like in the distant future. . "
Rebuilding this evolutionary view of the Mediterranean mountain ranges required collaboration, as it covers more than 30 countries, each with its own geological survey, maps and pre-existing ideas on the formation of things, said researchers.
With the aid of a tectonic plate reconstruction software, the researchers literally took off layers to go back in time, when the continents looked very different from the map we know today.
The researchers discovered that the Great Adria began to become its own continent about 240 million years ago during the Triassic Period.
"From this mapping appeared the image of the Great Adriatic, as well as several smaller continental blocks, which are now part of Romania, northern Turkey or Armenia, for example", said Van Hinsbergen. "The deformed remains of the last kilometers of the lost continent are still visible in the mountain ranges.The rest of the piece of continental plate, of a thickness of about 100 km, plunged beneath the south. Europe in the Earth's mantle, where always trace it with seismic waves up to a depth of 1,500 kilometers. "
This is not the first time that a lost continent is being found.
In January 2017, researchers announced the discovery of a lost continent left by the supercontinent Gondwana, which had begun to separate 200 million years ago. The remaining piece, which was covered with lava, is now
under Mauritius
, an island in the Indian Ocean.
And in September 2017, another research team discovered the lost continent of
Zealandia
by ocean drilling in the South Pacific. It is two-thirds of a mile under the sea.
Greater Adria is not the first lost continent to be found. But if the research done in recent years shows something, it will probably not be the last discovery.
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