Everyone knows there are only seven continents. The earth is also flat. And global warming is just a false environmentalist’s narrative. A hoax designed to help the elitists feel better about themselves.
Now, every once in a while, science (and eventually common sense) comes along and blows everybody’s pants off by proving the skeptics wrong. And as far as everything you learned in a first grade geography class goes, it turns out your old textbooks just became outdated over the weekend. We have Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Antarctica, Europe, Australia…and now, Zealandia, Australia’s ex (true story).
In a research paper published by the Geological Society of America titled Zealandia: Earth’s Hidden Continent, researchers say the islands we know as New Zealand are actually just the top of 4.9 million square kilometers of landmass. The catch here is that the two islands are just 6% of what’s now being called Zealandia. The other 94% of Zealandia remain underwater with all the qualifications of a bonafide continent: a large, continuous, discrete mass of land with crust thicker than the ocean floor, elevation above the surrounding area, and distinctive geology. Altogether, it’s about two-thirds the size of Australia, which geologists are saying it literally broke away from between 60 and 85 million years ago.
Technically, the sunken continent has been a topic of discussion for the past two decades, but researchers say it would have been recognized as a continent earlier if we’d just mapped the Earth’s surface differently. “If we could pull the plug on the oceans it would be clear to everyone we have mountain chains and a big high-standing continent above the ocean crust,” Nick Mortimer, a New Zealand government geologist said.
Apparently that’s all we had to do all along.
