G'day allynh
allynh wrote:Oh, this is a fun one. Read the article first, then check the Wiki page. Then go to google maps, type in "New Zealand" and switch to satellite view to see the undersea part.
Zealandia (continent)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zealandia_(continent)
Geologists spy an eighth continent: Zealandia
http://www.nature.com/news/geologists-s ... ia-1.21503
This mostly submerged world should be recognized alongside Africa, Australia and others, argue some researchers.
NASA/JSC
New Zealand (south island on the left) is part of what some scientists argue should be a new continent.
Haha, I'm glad you enjoy all this stuff... I do
I think New Zealand has proven it's a continent by the way they play rugby
",,,The progressive accumulation of bathymetric, geological, and geophysical data since the nineteenth century has led many authors to apply the adjective continental to New Zealand and some of its nearby submarine plateaus and rises. “New Zealand” was listed as a continent by Cogley (1984), but he noted that its continental limits were very sparsely mapped. The name Zealandia was first proposed by Luyendyk (1995) as a collective name for New Zealand, the Chatham Rise, Campbell Plateau, and Lord Howe Rise (Fig. 2). Implicit in Luyendyk’s paper was that this was a large region of continental crust..."
What constitutes a continent? I feel this is not an issue, the science of this is rock-solid
well, almost...
Yeah the issue of where exactly are the edges of the continents is interesting...
"Whereas most of Zealandia’s crust is thinner than the 30–46 km that is typical of most continents, the above studies show that it is everywhere thicker than the ~7-km-thick crust of the ocean basins. This result is visible in the global CRUST1.0 model of Laske et al. (2013) […]. Collectively, the crustal structure results show that the rock samples [across Zealandia] are not from separate continental fragments or blocks now separated by oceanic crust, but are from a single continental mass."
An important part of this is of course the land grab:
"The term [ocean grabbing] has emerged following a growing body of literature on land grabbing, which has been used to reference the purchase or expropriation of land (often in distant countries) by transnational or national corporations, governments, individuals or NGOs. These can include ‘grabs’ of land for fuel, food production, investment, conservation or other purposes <....> In the past few years, the term ‘ocean grabbing’ has come to broadly reference similar concerns as they pertain to the rights and livelihoods of small-scale fishers and vulnerable coastal peoples. Notably, in 2012, Olivier De Schutter, UN special rapporteur on the right to food, warned: “‘Ocean-grabbing’ – in the shape of shady access agreements that harm small-scale fishers, unreported catch, incursions into protected waters, and the diversion of resources away from local populations – can be as serious a threat as ‘land-grabbing’...”
Where has this 'new' 'continent' 'drifted' from... some articles say from Australia, or Antarctica or both:
"...Zealandia’s geology, they argue, indicates it broke off from the east Australian continental basins around 84 million years ago, and is similar in composition in many parts...."
(patriotic kiwis strongly deny the possibility)
Nowadays people talk about all sorts of mythical 'continents' which float around all over the place, in fact defying both logic and physics... crashing into each other, being 'recycled', 'breaking off', and 'suturing' and 'drifting', and 'becoming part of...', 'joined together', 'broke apart' etc,
some people speculate on unknown undersea connections...
"How strongly Bollons Seamount (south of the Chatham Islands) remains connected to Zealandia is unknown."
so 'continents' do and go wherever and whatever the newest theory requires...
more unstable than modern marriages....
The 'Expanding Earth' model means no 'continent' goes anywhere, it's very simple and straightforward, the relative movement is one earthquake or seismic event at a time, mainly by magma welling up at the mid-ocean cracks in the oceanic crusts... one simple theory explains all the observed evidence as pointed out by Pascual Jordan, as part of the consequences of Dirac's gravitational hypothesis...
Who was Pascual Jordan?
I'm glad you asked:
"Together with Max Born and Werner Heisenberg, Jordan was co-author of an important series of papers on quantum mechanics. He went on to pioneer early quantum field theory before largely switching his focus to cosmology before World War II."
"Jordan devised a type of non-associative algebras, now named Jordan algebras in his honor, in an attempt to create an algebra of observables for quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. Today, von Neumann algebras are also employed for this purpose. Jordan algebras have since been applied in projective geometry, number theory, complex analysis, optimization, and many other fields of pure and applied mathematics, and continue to be used in studying the mathematical and conceptual underpinnings of quantum theory."
"In 1966, Jordan published the 182 page work Die Expansion der Erde. Folgerungen aus der Diracschen Gravitationshypothese (The expansion of the Earth. Conclusions from the Dirac gravitation hypothesis) in which he developed his theory that, according to Paul Dirac's hypothesis of a steady weakening of gravitation throughout the history of the universe, the Earth may have swollen to its current size, from an initial ball of a diameter of only about 7,000 kilometres (4,300 mi). This theory could explain why the ductile lower sima layer of the Earth's crust is of a comparatively uniform thickness, while the brittle upper sial layer of the Earth's crust had broken apart into the main continental plates. The continents having to adapt to the ever flatter surface of the growing ball, the mountain ranges on the Earth's surface would, in the course of that, have come into being as constricted folds."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascual_Jordan
Nowadays new continents pop up as if they were real, in much the same way as myths are formed:
"Gondwanaland, is the name given to an ancient supercontinent. It is believed to have sutured between about 573 and 510 million years ago (Mya), joining East Gondwana to West Gondwana. Gondwana formed prior to Pangaea, and later became part of it.
Around 335 Mya Gondwana and Laurasia joined together to form the supercontinent Pangaea, which existed until approximately 215-175 Mya. Gondwana then separated from Laurasia (the mid-Mesozoic era) in the breakup of Pangaea, drifting farther south after the split. Gondwana itself then also broke apart.
Gondwana included most of the landmasses in today's Southern Hemisphere, including Antarctica, South America, Africa, Madagascar, and the Australian continent, as well as the Arabian Peninsula and the Indian subcontinent, which have now moved entirely into the Northern Hemisphere."
Actually if the truth were known, Gondwana is not a continent and is actually a province of India
"...Scholars believe that Gonds settled in Gondwana, now known as eastern Madhya Pradesh..."