There is a new continent on Earth, hidden for millions of years, which researchers claim they have discovered while reconstructing the evolution of Mediterranean region’s complex ideology.
The continent they called Greater Adria rises with mountain ranges and dips with seas from Spain to Iran—the size of Greenland—2.166 million km²—and it broke off from North Africa, only to be buried under Southern Europe about 140 million years ago.
Greenland is the world’s largest island, between the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. It is an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark.
“Forget Atlantis,” said Douwe van Hinsbergen, study author and professor of global tectonics and paleogeography at Utrecht University.
He was referring to the lost city of Atlantis, the legendary metropolis believed by a US-led research team in 2011 swamped by a tsunami thousands of years ago, in mud flats in southern Spain.
The study was published this month in the journal Gondwana Research, where the study author said “Without realizing it, vast numbers of tourists spend their holiday each year on the lost continent of Greater Adria.”
Researching the evolution of mountain ranges can show the evolution of continents.
“Most mountain chains that we investigated originated from a single continent that separated from North Africa more than 200 million years ago,” said van Hinsbergen.
“The only remaining part of this continent is a strip that runs from Turin via the Adriatic Sea to the heel of the boot that forms Italy.”
Geologists call the area Adria, so the researchers for this study refer to the previously undiscovered continent as Greater Adria.
In the Mediterranean region, geologists have a different understanding of plate tectonics.
Plate tectonics are the theory behind how oceans and continents form, and for other parts of the Earth, that theory suggests that the plates don’t deform when they move alongside each other in areas with large fault lines.
But Turkey, and the Mediterranean are entirely different.
“It is quite simply a geological mess: Everything is curved, broken and stacked,” said van Hinsbergen. “Compared to this, the Himalayas, for example, represent a rather simple system. There you can follow
several large fault lines across a distance of more than 2,000 kilometers.”
In the case of Greater Adria, most of it was underwater, covered by shallow seas, coral reefs, and sediments.
The sediments formed rocks and those were scraped off like barnacles when Greater Adria was forced under the mantle of Southern Europe.
Those scrapped rocks became mountain ranges in these areas: the Alps, the Apennines, the Balkans, Greece, and Turkey.