The eighth continent .. Zealandia is a frightening world and secrets for the first time

At a depth of about 3500 feet (1066 meters) beneath the waves of the South Pacific rests the lost eighth continent, that huge submerged land mass, called Zealandia, which scientists confirmed as a continent in 2017, but they were not able to draw a map showing its full breadth. .

Zealandia lies under the waters of the Pacific Ocean, in the southwestern part, and it appears that present-day New Zealand was only a part of it.

"We created these maps to provide an accurate, complete, and up-to-date picture of New Zealand's geology and the Southwest Pacific - better than we've had before," said Nick Mortimer, who led the team.

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Mortimer et al.'s bathymetric map surrounding Zealandia, the shape and depth of the ocean floor, in addition to its tectonic data, revealed Zealandia's exact location, across tectonic plate boundaries.

The maps also revealed new information about how Zealandia, which was submerged millions of years ago, formed.

According to the new details, Zealandia covers an area of ​​about 5 million square miles (XNUMX million square kilometers), about half the size of the nearby continent of Australia.

To learn more about the submerged continent, Mortimer and his team mapped Zealandia and the ocean floor around it. The bathymetric map they created shows how high the continent's mountains and ridges are toward the water's surface.

The map also depicts coastlines, and the names of major undersea features. The map is part of global initiative To map the entire ocean floor by 2030.

It is believed that Zealandia separated from Australia about 80 million years ago, and sank under the sea with the splitting of the supercontinent that was known as Gondwana Land.

Mortimer had previously explained that geologists had found, in the early part of the previous century, granite pieces from islands near New Zealand, and metamorphic rocks in New Caledonia indicating continental geology.