The hidden continent called Grande Adria lies beneath modern Europe



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a bigger adriaA map of the location of the mainland of the Great Adriatic there are 140 million years.Courtesy of Douwe van Hinsbergen

  • Hundreds of millions of years ago, the Earth had a giant supercontinent named Pangea.
  • Pangea eventually split into smaller masses, which then fragmented and became our modern continents.
  • New research shows that an eighth continent has slipped under what is now southern Europe about 120 million years ago and that it is still hidden deep within the Earth.
  • Scientists have named this lost continent "Greater Adria". Its highest regions form mountain ranges throughout Europe, such as the Alps.
  • Visit the Business Insider home page for more stories.

The world map was very different 240 million years ago.

The modern continents of the Earth were united in a supercontinent in the form of a pacified man called Pangea, which split into two fragments: Laurasia in the north and Gondwana in the south. The first became Europe, Asia and North America. The latter dispersed to form modern Africa, Antarctica, South America and Australia.

But now scientists have discovered the fate of a fifth continent born in Gondwana, which they named Greater Adria. A study published last week showed that geological forces slowly pushed Greenland's landmass back under southern Europe 120 to 100 million years ago.

The continent was already half-submerged at first, but as it moved towards the Earth's mantle (the rocky inner layer of our planet), its upper layer tore apart, becoming a food for the mountains in the 30 countries current Europeans.

IstriaThe region of Istria in Croatia.Flickr / Gigi Griffis

Douwe van Hinsbergen, the main author of the study, compared the Greater Adria subduction to the act of pushing an arm dressed under the edge of a table.

"Suppose you wear a sweater," he told Business Insider. When you push your arm under the table, the sleeve of the sweater remains in place, bending and protruding upward. The folded handle is "the equivalent of the top few kilometers of the Adria crust, and your arm is the plate that sinks into the mantle, hundreds, even thousands of kilometers under our feet, "van Hinsbergen said.

These "folds of sweaters" became Eurasian mountain belts such as the Apennines in Italy, the Dinarides in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Swiss Alps, the Zagros Mountains of Iran and the Himalayas.

Reconstruction of the geological history of Grand Adria

In order to reconstruct the past of Grand Adria, van Hinsbergen and his colleagues spent a decade aggregating geological data from European countries, North Africa and West Asia.

Natural magnets in the Earth's crust can help scientists track 240-million-year-old tectonic plate movements. When the hot lava cools down to the boundary between two moving plates, it traps rocks containing magnetic minerals that align with the Earth's magnetic fields at the time. The rocks keep this alignment. Scientists can therefore use their orientation to calculate the location of these magnets on the planet millions of years ago.

The researchers studied magnetic rocks from 2,300 ancient sites in the Mediterranean region. Next, they used this data to create computer simulations of tectonic plate movements of the Earth before, during, and after the descent of the metropolitan area of ​​Adria into the mantle.

The researchers determined that the hidden continent was separating from present-day Africa 220 million years ago, and then further separated from what would become the Iberian Peninsula 40 million years later. About 140 million years ago, van Hinsbergen told Live Science that the Great Adria was probably a chain of archipelagos.

At that time, Adria probably resembled modern New Zealand, the mini-continent that underlies the islands of northern and southern New Zealand. Only 7% of Zealandia is above sea level.

Read more: The Earth has a brand new continent called Zealandia, and it's been hiding for centuries

Globe_View_Greater_Adria_Europe_FixedA reconstruction of what Earth's land masses looked like 140 million years ago. The darker green indicates the landmasses above the water, while the lighter green indicates the submerged lands.Courtesy of Douwe van Hinsbergen

Then, there are between 120 and 100 million years ago, the hustle and bustle of Earth's tectonic plates forced the Great Adriatic to sink into the mantle, under present Southern Europe.

"The deepest parts are now at a depth of 1,500 kilometers below Greece," van Hinsbergen said.

The authors of the study also discovered that some fragments of the Greater Adria region did not under-drive in Europe but remained above sea level. They eventually became parts of Italy, like Turin and Venice, as well as the region of Istria in Croatia.

Knowing what Earth looked like millions of years ago could make it easier to find valuable mineral deposits

According to van Hinsbergen, reconstructing the geological history of our planet can help countries and companies seeking to exploit valuable mineral deposits, as scientists can highlight the regional characteristics of how certain magnetic materials are found. deposit in the earth's crust.

"Metals, ceramics, building materials, everything came out of the rock," he said. "You do not find the next gold or copper mine, nor the 25 materials you've never heard of that make your iPhone run, while walking in the woods."

Geological reconstructions could also help researchers better understand how existing ore and ore deposits – which we already know – are formed and where the remaining materials could be buried.

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