Tourists May Have Spent Their Holiday On The Lost Continent Of Greater Adria "Without Realizing It"

Around 200 million years ago , Earth ’s last supercontinent Pangea begin to break apart , with plate tectonics slowly go the continents into the world we recognize today .

Plate plate tectonics was only discovered comparatively recently . Though German meteorologist Alfred Wegner first aim continental drift in 1912 – and hypothesized that the continents were once joined in a supercontinenthe named Pangaea – it took until the 1960s and raw tech such as reverberation sounders and gaussmeter before scientist studying ocean ridge could explain the cognitive process behind the motion of the crust .

Since then , scientists have put together models of home tectonics , incorporating new data and have recover the occasionalnew continent .   In 2019 , one team looked at the Mediterranean area , known for being particularly complex geologically .

" It is quite simply a geological mess : everything is curved , broken , and stacked , " principal research worker Douwe van Hinsbergen , Professor of Global Tectonics and Paleogeography at Utrecht University ’s Department of Earth Sciences , explain in astatement . " Compared to this , the Himalayas , for illustration , map a rather mere system . There you could follow several large fault lines across a distance of more than 2000 kilometer . "

Investigating the country from Spain to Iran over ten twelvemonth and reconstructing it , they receive that southern Europe has been sat on top of a chunk of continental crust around the sizing of Greenland , which separated from Africa over 200 million age ago .

" Forget Atlantis . Without realising it , Brobdingnagian number of tourer spend their holiday each class on the lost continent of Greater Adria , " the statementexplained .

While most of the lose continent became subducted into the mantle , pieces of the crust – in particular aqueous rock-and-roll – now make up the Apennine mountains , office of the Alps , the Balkans , Greece , and Turkey .

" Most mountain chains that we investigated originate from a single continent that break up from North Africa more than 200 million days ago , " Van Hinsbergen summate .

Though you wo n’t see most of the continent without scuba paraphernalia , with coral Witwatersrand being deposit above some of the baffled continent , a little part of it remains visible .

" The only stay part of this continent is a slip that runs from Turin via the Adriatic Sea to the heel of the boot that forge Italy . "

Other lost continents include Zealandia , which wasrecently sampledafter sinking 100 to 80 million years ago .

The study is published inGondwana Research .