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A mega-continent slipped under Europe hundreds of millions of years ago.
Although we know today of extreme weather conditions and the effects of climate change, it has never been so time to live on planet Earth. 140 million years ago, a supercontinent called Greater Adria slipped under the mass of land that now forms southern Europe and researchers have now visually restored the lost continent.
The ancient continent, the Great Adriatic as it existed 140 million years ago, before slipping under the south of Europe. The darker green areas represent the land above the water and the lighter green, the earth below. Source: Douwe van Hinsbergen.
Science magazine reported on the new study published earlier this month in the journal Gondwana Research , which established that Gondwana, a vast southern supercontinent composed of Africa, Antarctica, South America and Australia included the "Grand Adria", a land mass that spread from what is now the Alps to Iran.
The principal author of the article, Douwe van Hinsbergen, holder of the chair of world tectonics and paleogeography of the Department of Earth Sciences of the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, said that the entire landmass was not above water and that it was an archipelago chaplet, which would have been "good for scuba diving, "he added.
Continental speed change
According to a report on National Geographic , About 240 million years ago, the Grand Adria was part of the supercontinent of Pangea which had separated from Africa 20 million years later, before separating from France and Spain 40 million years later to become an isolated continent. There are between 100 and 120 million years ago, the Grand Adria crashed in Europe, thus forming the Alps and anchoring the rocks as teams of geologists spent a decade picking up on them. old continent.
The Great Adria was part of the supercontinent of Pangea that separated from Africa 20 million years later. (Justass / CC BY-SA 3.0 )
Hinsbergen told Live Science that Grand Adrian's change has formed mountain ranges in 30 different countries, each with their own geological studies, maps, stories and their own continents. He added that the new study "put all of these elements together in an overview".
You know how problematic it is to measure and assemble an Ikea office chair, is not it? Well, where can you begin to measure the motion of an entire continent and then interpret all the data with sufficient precision to draw a conclusion, especially a peer-reviewed conclusion? According to Hinsbergen, it's like a big puzzle where everything is mixed up and he told Live Science that he had spent "the last 10 years piecing together the puzzle."
The Apennines of central Italy are part of the shaven remains of the ancient continent of the Adriatic, revealed tectonic research. (Marcel Oosterwijk / CC BY-SA 2.0 )
Exploring volcanoes and coral reefs
The researchers began by studying measured orientations in tiny magnetic minerals formed by primitive bacteria in these rocks, which align with the Earth's magnetic field. When these bacteria die, the residual magnetic minerals left in the sediments eventually turn into rocks, thus locking in the original directions of the bacteria, which researchers have altered by recovering them for hundreds of millions of years.
If we consider what an earthquake or volcanic eruption can do for a landscape, twisting it and folding it beyond recognition, how did scientists report it when calculating the original directions of the magnetic particles? Not to mention the magnetic pole that is never immobile and oscillates over millennia. Hinsbergen said that moving faults disperse the rocks like pieces of "broken plate". Thus, his team of researchers worked as a team of highly skilled antique restorers working on a crushed Ming vase, first gathering and then gathering large rocks once married from chains of volcanoes and coral reefs.
Peeled and frozen in time
After more than ten years of collecting and studying groups of rocks, and with a table of corresponding magnetic orientations, the researchers finally created high-resolution maps of the old continent. Their findings confirm that before slipping into the depths of the mantle under the European mass, the old continent was "twisted" and moved northward and the upper layer peeling off overlying plates forming what would become the mountains of Italy, Turkey, Greece, the Alps and the Balkans.
Rather than simply moving north without changing orientation, the Great Adria turned in the opposite direction of the hands of a clock, jostling and grazing other tectonic plates. (Science Direct)
Today, if you visited the Adriatic Sea, turn your back to the water and climb into the surrounding mountains, you would run over the wrinkled remains; the skin of a lost continent that is now bubbling through the volcanoes and geezers of Greece and Italy.
Top image: The Apennines of central Italy are part of the shaved remains of the ancient continent of the Great Adriatic. ( Wild Travel / Adobe Stock )
By Ashley Cowie
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