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Geologists have discovered a new hidden continent in the Mediterranean region after analyzing in detail all the mountain ranges from Spain to Iran for 10 years.
The research, published in the journal Gondwana Research, revealed how a piece of continental crust the size of Greenland once separated from North Africa had plunged into the terrestrial mantle beneath the south of Europe.
Considered the eighth continent on the planet, this piece of continental crust is called "Greater Adria".
"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. Principal Investigator Douwe van Hinsbergen, Professor of Global Tectonics and Paleogeography at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands.
"The only remaining part of this continent is a strip that connects Turin to the heel of the boot forming Italy, passing through the Adriatic Sea," said Van Hinsbergen.
Most of this continent was located under water and formed shallow tropical seas in which sediments were deposited, for example in large coral reefs.
Sedimentary rocks, in particular, were scraped when the rest of the continent was subjected to mantle. These scrapings are now the mountains of the Apennines, Alps, Balkans, Greece and Turkey, said the study.
The reconstruction was a collaboration between geologists from Utrecht, Oslo and Zurich.
By restoring the lost region of Adria, geologists have made a substantial contribution to fundamental knowledge about mountain formation.
For the reconstruction of this region, geologists have used the advanced tectonic plate reconstruction software Gplates.
"It is not only a large region, but also more than 30 countries, each of which has its own geological survey, its own maps and its own ideas about the history of the evolution, "said Van Hinsbergen, while explaining why long for the discovery.
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