Earth Has a New Continent, But It's Hiding

i'll bet you've heard of the lost civilization of atlantis sinking into the waters off the coast of ancient greece the story is supposed to be a myth but have scientists finally found the lost city not sure about that but they did find a lost continent wait just one minute i've lost socks keys and even a few marbles but how careless do you have to be to misplace an entire continent we'll have to ask our planet about that one earth lost what was called greater adria between 100 and 120 million years ago so how did that happen and where did it go the only way to describe the process would be kind of like a snake slipping through rocks or going down into a hole it's easier to imagine losing a continent when you think about how hard it is to find a snake that's escaped your curious stairs most snakes don't leave trails in fact if you weren't around 100 million years ago to watch that snake slide beneath a boulder and i wasn't you'd never know what happened just like scientists might never have found adria if it weren't for the snakeskin i mean the mountains let's say your fleeing snake slithers under a rock it's long past due for a shedding so its old skin scrapes off and bunches up right there in that tiny space between the boulder and the ground that's what greater adria did when it broke off from a humongous land mass known as gonjuana stick around for more on that here in a few the greenland-sized chunk headed north when it eventually crashed into europe it slipped under and caused the meeting place of the two continents to fold and scrunch up for years and years it just kept going and those folds kept growing in the end it left behind very obvious and famous traces you might even have gone skiing on them during a winter vacation i'm talking about the appenys and the swiss alps professor dowie van hinsbergen the geologist who led the research team responsible for this colossal discovery in september 2019 has his own analogy he compares this folding action to what happens when you stick your arm into a small space and your shirt sleeve can't fit through it bunches up and those bunches are like the mountain range you might be wondering if other mountain ranges have similar origins they do ever push sand together with your hands your hands work like shifting land masses and those peaks of sand you created are a mini version of the rockies the snakeskin your shirt sleeve the sand the point here is that mountains get left behind when massive chunks of land smash into and slip under each other but what about the disappearing continent that leaves them what happened to greater adria itself just as a snake burrows underground for the winter adria kept sliding beneath the surface dr van hinsbergen thinks she's probably nice and cozy about 900 miles under southern europe right now but wait a minute is greater adria still a continent if she's underwater or underland is a snake still a snake when it's underground of course it is in fact i know a continent that's mostly underwater yet isn't lost at all ever heard of zeelandia it's also called the new zealand continent or tasmantis it looks like an archipelago which is a string of islands but if you peek under the water you'll see that it's really one continuous piece of submerged land with mountain tops poking out over the surface those peaks are the islands zealandia is categorized as a micro-continent which then begs the question what is a continent anyway that's a matter of some debate in fact we earthlings can't even agree on how many continents not counting the lost and micro ones there are generally a continent is an enormous land mass if you're from the us you heard that there are seven of them africa antarctica asia australia also called oceana europe north america and south america european school kids however combine europe and asia into eurasia so they only learn six continents south americans also recognize six but they keep europe and asia separate and combine north and south america instead what's even stranger is that everyone seems to agree that australia is a continent while greenland isn't and has to make do with the title of world's biggest island poor greenland this all has something to do with the tectonic plates that lie beneath the continents but that's a discussion best left for another video so where did all these continents come from in the first place well if you've ever looked at a globe or a map you probably noticed that the two great landmasses surrounding the atlantic ocean north and south america on one side and europe and africa on the other seem like puzzle pieces that could be pushed together to form one even more gigantic mass you might also know that there's a name for that mass pangaea scientists think pangaea a supercontinent if there ever was one broke apart 175 million years ago but not into those two big left and right puzzle pieces we have today instead the split probably ran horizontally leaving a connected north america europe and asia on top a mass called lorasia while south america stuck it out with africa antarctica in australia in a mass known as gondwana yes that very one that greater adria would break free from later on so if you took all of earth's land masses continents microcontinents islands and archipelagos and squished them together would you get the original blob of land known as pangaea nope not only would you be missing the parts of continents that lie underwater like the masses connecting archipelagos you'd also be missing all the ones lost over time oh yeah there are others besides adria scientists are looking for them and they've already found some one of those lost continents is the rio grande rise it's a stretch of underwater seamounts that's been dubbed brazil's atlantis greater adria lays somewhere between north africa and southern eurasia hey that's right around the mediterranean sea and the mediterranean is where greece and athens are so greater adria must have been atlantis right doubtful historians think plato made up the story of atlantis but could it have really happened you might think so if you believe the story of greek deities punishing the civilization for starting a beef with athens but a more scientific theory would propose that atlantis was simply flooded or perhaps it could have been one of the islands scraped off and left behind when greater adria dove under europe disappointing as it is to say the one thing we can't be sure of is that adria itself wasn't atlantis the tectonic forces that shoved the continent under europe did so over 100 million years ago that's about 80 million years before any human showed up on our planet to start a conflict with athens or anyone else if you look at all the world's continents like broken puzzle pieces that formed a shattered pangaea you could say that dr van hinsbergen and his team have spent the last 10 years trying to put that puzzle back together and like actual puzzles it's hard to do that when you're missing a bunch of pieces i'm looking at you adria but they have fancy geological equipment that tracks the magnetic record left behind in the rock's minerals you see every rock stone and mountain has a sort of imprint of the time and place it was created it all has to do with the earth's magnetic poles they change every now and then in a process called geomagnetic reversal so in a nutshell the specific magnetism of certain sediment and minerals works like a map and calendar and that's how they know where adria came from where she ended up and who she met along the way by studying the magnetism of these samples the team also found out another interesting detail greater adria not only crashed into europe but she was also spinning on the way there ah a twirling dancing mass of land whose carefree trip northward would be cut short by an unexpected roadblock known as europe hey that would make for a great bedtime fairy tale for the kids now my only remaining question is if greater adria dove beneath europe could she rise again it is possible continents keep shifting and they remain on the move today but they tend to go at a snail's pace so check back in another 100 million years and we'll see how many continents second graders are learning about in the future i won't be here though i'll probably retire

Channel: BRIGHT SIDE

Views: 2,009,035

Rating: 4.8786516 out of 5

Keywords: atlantis the lost empire, sunken continents, new zealand, recent discoveries, earth history, future of the earth, supercontinent, atlantis, bright side, greater adria continent, ocean disappears, greater adria civilization, greater adria found, new continent, pacific ocean, greater adria 2020, greater adria and zealandia, landmasses, greater adria, past of the earth, tectonic plates, australia, zealandia, brightside, greater adria atlantis, super-ocean, apennine mountain range

Id: INKTsNeOPGc

Length: 9min 24sec (564 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 08 2020