Researchers discovered a hidden continent on Earth, but it is not Atlantis.
The discovery came after specialists reconstructed the evolution of the complex geology of the Mediterranean region, which rises with mountain ranges and plunges into seas from Spain to Iran.
The continent, which was called Greater Adria, is the size of Greenland and separated from North Africa, only to be buried under southern Europe about 140 million years ago.
Experts say that chances are that someone would have ever been there without even knowing it.
“Forget Atlantis,” said Douwe van Hinsbergen, study author and professor of global tectonics and paleogeography at the University of Utrecht. “Inadvertently, a large number of tourists spend their holidays every year on the lost continent of Gran Adria.”
“The only remaining part of this continent is a strip that runs from Turin across the Adriatic Sea to the heel of the boot that forms Italy.”
Geologists call this area Adria, so the researchers in this study refer to the newly discovered continent as Great Adria.
In the Mediterranean region, geologists have a different understanding of plate tectonics, which is the theory behind how oceans and continents form and that suggests that plates do not deform when moving together in areas with large lines of fall To.
In the case of Great Adria, most of it was underwater, covered by shallow seas, coral reefs and sediments, which formed rocks and disappeared when Gran Adria remained under the mantle of southern Europe. These discarded rocks became mountain ranges in the Alps, the Apennines, the Balkans, Greece and Turkey.
Reconstructing the evolutionary gaze to the Mediterranean mountain ranges required collaboration because it covers more than 30 countries, each with its own geological study, maps and pre-existing ideas on how the layers were formed, the researchers said.
Using plate tectonic reconstruction software, researchers literally took off the layers to go back in time when continents looked very different from the map we know today.
Researchers discovered that Gran Adria began to become its own continent about 240 million years ago during the Triassic period.
This is not the first time a lost continent has been found. In January 2017, researchers announced the discovery of a lost continent left over from the supercontinent Gondwana, which began to break down 200 million years ago. The leftover piece, which was covered in lava, is now located beneath Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean.
