Earth's REAL Lost Continents

Lately I've been looking at the Earth a little differently. I used to think that the world was divided into two parts, land and sea, where one ends and the other begins well. The problem with this is that the land never ends, the ocean surely ends. that's what we call the coastline, but the land is still under all the water, there is still land, we just don't consider it land because well, we don't see it as land, in fact, we don't see it at all. makes it easy to forget that sea level on Earth is purely a result of chance - if some asteroids had not arrived here much earlier in the planet's life, sea levels could have been much lower than they are Now and more of the planet's surface would have been exposed, if even more asteroids had been pushed towards us, we could have had an even deeper planet underwater;

However, no matter how much water reached Earth here, the underlying geological structures would always have been the same. Removing water from the equation completely makes visible the true shape of On the planet, what we will discover by doing this is that the

continents

that break apart leave behind fragments of their own bodies, while magma will spill onto the surface wherever it can. , literally building new landforms in the middle of nowhere, when this results in formations over the sea. level, we

real

ize this right away and call them islands or mountains, so today I would like to look beyond the water to the geography below to better understand how this planet works and hopefully in the end know a little more about the sur

real

ity of the

earth

.

lost

land masses.

I would like to start by talking about by far the largest and best known of these submerged formations. I actually already made a whole video about it, but for those of you watching who may be new here, this is Zeelandia. Here we find a Continental Fragment almost 5 million square kilometers in size, more than twice the size of Greenland and more than half the size of nearby Australia. If this landmass had been raised a little higher, it is difficult to say whether we would have considered it as a separate continent or simply the largest island on the planet, of course, we don't have to worry about that because despite having a base So rocky, only seven percent of the land mass rises above sea level to support the land we call the islands of New Zealand and New Caledonia.

This was not the case 80 million years ago, however, back then Zealand was squeezed and squeezed between Australia and Antarctica, compressing its total area in exchange for making the land mass sit much higher above the ocean, but slowly as Australia and Antarctica separated from each other. became trapped between them and spread further and further until only the highest mountains on

earth

rose high enough to jut out of the ocean, shedding peripheral continental crust in this way is just one way that huge amounts of elevated crust make their way below sea level, another way is for the earth to be born underwater this process begins when the oceanic crust sinks beneath the continental crust creating an oceanic trench followed by a line of volcanoes fed by the decomposition of the crust sunken the most popular example of this tends to be the Andes mountains where the plate is being driven beneath the South American plate creating the Atacama Trench before building a 7,000 kilometer long line of mountains and volcanoes where this same process occurs without the support of a pre-existing continental cross, such as where the Pacific plate is subducted beneath the much smaller Marian plate, mountains and volcanoes are generated underwater, what has been created is a land mass that covers more than 1 million square kilometers named after the Izu, Bonen and Marianas Islands the Izu Bonan Marian Arc features at least 60 active volcanoes, technically this means that the land mass has not actually been

lost

but is emerging ;

It is the same process of volcanic land formation that gave rise to the nearby Japanese Islands and in fact if you go back even further you can see the Pacific plate surrounded by several of the surrounding plates, all of this has led to Due to the accumulation of many volcanic chains known collectively as the ring of fire with modern sea levels, these volcanic chains look like just a few small islands, but looking across the water we can see mountains that really are the only place where this volcanism has not gave rise to a significant dry land mass and is still here, although if humans had taken just a couple million years longer to evolve, we might have inherited a much longer Japan, as well as an even longer Pacific coast. populated, combining these two processes together is how we begin.

To describe these two elevations right here, the Anton Jaba Plateau and the Manahiki Plateau, seen 120 million years ago, Australia and Antarctica began to separate, stretching the ocean floor between them enough to cause them to broke, causing the spill of 80 million cubic meters. Kilometers of basaltic magma formed the largest oceanic plateau on Earth, but as Australia and Antarctica drifted apart, this huge igneous province broke into pieces. The Anton Java Plateau is the largest of these volcanic fragments, covering 920,000 square kilometers, but it is currently sinking under the Solomon Passage. The trench that feeds the construction of the nearby Manahiki Solomon Islands is not doing much better and covers 770,000 square kilometers, only three small atolls cling above the water fitting almost perfectly between Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia.

I can only imagine how many unfortunate Pacific island explorers settled We went out to sea hoping to find what Manahiki might have been. Looking deeper into the Pacific, the influence of plate tectonics diminishes and volcanism becomes the predominant force in landscaping. I guess the first thing we should notice before we really get into this is how many islands. There are actually here today an estimated 25,000 islands rising above the Pacific Ocean, but only the tallest, youngest and most violent islands survive here and this number does not do justice to how many volcanic islands were not able to be built. by themselves. six or seven kilometers high from the bottom of the ocean, which shows us how eager magma is to come to the surface of the earth when a certain part of the mantle continues to show through any available crack, that is what we would call a hot spot or plume when magma is continuously released through a hot spot on a moving oceanic plate a chain of islands can be left behind.

The most popular example of this is Hawaii, where the Hawaiian hot spot has been active for the past, however, not only has it been for many millions of years. This produced the approximately eight islands we see today, but has also left a trail of invisible islands that have been eroded beneath the sea. This chain can be followed to the Pacific Trench, where it eventually disappears beneath the North American plate. For an example of what happens when hotspots inevitably fade, we can look at two very similar features: the first is the mountains of the mid-Pacific, while the main body of this land mass covers approximately 770,000 square kilometers; we can trace its volcanic tail much further down. the kitty boss islands with an end point somewhere in french polynesia the shotsky hess plumage follows a similar path even crossing the middle pacific path before leaving to end up somewhere in the middle of the ocean looking at the paths drawn in the crust by These two hot spots tell us which direction the Pacific plate was moving when it passed and these two chains show a roughly northwestward trend over their foreseeable history.

First of all, this is not perfect because the plate itself can change direction and warp over time. but also because the hot spots themselves can move beneath the crust, making these tracks useful, but even less accurate, for understanding plate movements. Another thing we can see by looking at these two similar features is that the magmatic discharge is usually greatest at the beginning of the formation of a hot spot. life and as the column weakens over time the islands decrease in size, that is why we can see the fronts of these trails built into notable plateau heads followed by a long tail of gradually smaller islands as the point hot goes out, in fact, the head of The Shotsky Hess formation known as the Tamu massif is technically the largest volcano on Earth, with an area of ​​more than 000 square kilometers, making it larger even than moms Olympus in Mars, applying the same idea to the Hawaiian island chain and considering the length of this hotspot. has been producing magma, we can only assume that the start of this volcanism must have left a much larger land mass than the one we are seeing today, the only problem is that it has since disappeared beneath Russia and is likely, at least in part, the reason why Kamchatka is so built up today, meaning that not only has the main body of the Hawaiian continent been lost, but it has also been wiped off the face of the earth and there is no way to that we know what it was like, but that the Pacific is not the only ocean in the world. land, which means we still have a lot to talk about, so we'll have to move to the Indian Ocean, although this may indeed be the most boring ocean when it comes to islands, looking underwater reveals a different story , the most important.

It's happening here and the second largest lost landmass I'll talk about is the Kurgulin Plateau, active for 130 million years. The Kerguelen hotspot has produced an igneous province stretching over 1.2 million square kilometers or more than half the size of Greenland, but this is not even the full story, as 120 million years ago, before Antarctica completely separated from Australia, this hot spot accumulated rocks on both sides of the oceanic rift as the

continents

moved away, a 300,000 square kilometer chunk of the Kerguelen land mass was held by the Australian plate that carries the characteristic known as broken ridge thousands of kilometers from its origin, while it is exciting to try to imagine a world with more of this microcontinent exposed, looking at the small collection of islands left here shows us that the local climate would have been very cold, so For example, the small Kyrgylin Islands have extensive glaciers even now and most of the mass lies even closer to Antarctica.

That said, the Kerguelen Plateau also reaches up to 45 degrees south, theoretically putting the northern kingdom in the temperate zone, proving that with enough precipitation, Kerguelen could have featured its own exotic and thriving flora and fauna. As to who would have been the first to discover and inhabit such a place, we can only speculate now that the Austronesians who left the Indonesian islands reached Madagascar so early. about 350 BC C., which leads me to believe that they could have arrived here as well, but having originated in the tropics, I am not sure how enthusiastic these people would have been about colonizing a subantarctic land and it probably would not have been until 350 BC. .

C. In the European era of exploration, larger populations better equipped for the environment would eventually have arrived. Kerguelen would probably have ended up looking like New Zealand both in terms of landscape and demographics. Broken Ridge, on the other hand, would have experienced a climate similar to southwestern Australia. much better environment for migrating ethnic groups and would probably have been significantly populated upon the arrival of Europeans looking just off the broken ridge; However, we will find a plateau of similar elevation but with a radically different shape that runs almost parallel 90 degrees east of the 90 east ridge. It is another product of the dragging of a plate through a hot volcanic spot, only this time instead of building a chain of seamounts a more continuous land mass was built, the result was a single landform of 5,000 kilometers long which only comes to an end where the flare fan mask deposits are deposited any additional accumulation in total 90 to the east covers an area of ​​more than 740 thousand square kilometers and that is not including the Osborne Plateau, if it had been on the sea, we could have ended up with a very strange land line extending directly from the depths of Myanmar. in the center of the Indian Ocean it is difficult to guess what implications this land mass would have had for human and natural history, but I can at least say that it would have acted as a solid wall against the ocean currents thatdisrupt or redirect the global planet.

Water transport can alter weather patterns in drastic and unpredictable ways. The rest of the notable features of the Indian Ocean all come from the messy rift between India and Africa. This split was driven by the central Indian rift which in turn released a huge flow of magma. building what is known as the Deccan Traps in southern India, as the rift forced the subcontinent further and further away, the hot spot fell onto parts of the newly created ocean, building an expanse off the coast of India called Chagos Lakkadive ridge, leaving a much longer Indian subcontinent. From what it appears, igneous material from this Deccan event ended up on the other side of the rift combined with pre-existing continental remains to form the Mascarene Plateau, while the islands of Seychelles and Mauritius cover only 0.8 percent of the 300,000 square kilometers of land.

Massive parts of it lie just eight meters below sea level, which means that only a couple of thousand years ago, during the last ice age, when sea levels were up to 130 meters lower than The Masquerine archipelago was not the only piece of crust that broke away from Africa. However, it is easy to forget that India and Madagascar stayed together at the beginning. It was only about 50 million years after separating from Africa that Madagascar began to fall behind and finally crumbled into the island we now know, but like Masquerine and actually all of these, there is more than what you are seeing here, of In fact, Madagascar's land mass extends much further south in a roughly equal area.

To what lies above sea level today, together this makes Madagascar's land mass approximately 1.1 million square kilometers, almost as large as Kyrgulen and the third largest lost or at least partially lost continental fragment in the world. land. The southernmost part of the plateau, what is called Walter Bank, lies only 18 meters below sea level, which means that at least part of this Greater Madagascar was also dry only a few thousand years ago. during the last glacial maximum. However, this is not the end of the story, as Antarctica used to cling to the southern tip of Africa until the Southwestern Indian Ridge tore them apart, leaving two large pieces of tectonic rubble behind to become the Mozambique Plateaus and Algol.

Both landmasses measure roughly around 200,000 square kilometers and together help reveal the gaping wound that is the southeastern side of Africa moving around the South African cape, where we eventually enter. the Atlantic Ocean and you don't have to look long before you find another exceptionally strange land mass jutting out from the side of the continent, this 280 thousand square kilometer peninsula is the Walvis Ridge, the result of you guessed it, a volcanic hot spot when the supercontinent Gondwana separated from the two larger parts were divided by the mid-Atlantic rift that differentiates Africa from South America. Magma escaped through this rift continually building this ridge until the volcanism of the Tristan hot spot subsided where this igneous material fell into the western part of the rift.

The elevation of the Rio Grande Province was also built creating a nearly symmetrical basalt deposit on both sides of the mid-Atlantic mountain range, while at only 130,000 square kilometers, this is another landmass that becomes much more fascinating if It considers what it might have looked like today. to Brazil's Atlantic rainforest, these islands could have been home to rich rainforests like no other on earth, while again it's impossible to know if humans had arrived here in ancient history, exploring Europeans would definitely have found them around the same time. that the rest of the americas were being discovered sitting on the portuguese side of the treaty of tordesillas, it is logical to assume that portugal would have taken possession of these lands from any unfortunate locals who might have found their way here before this, as portugal attempted Capitalizing on their New World claims, this would likely have served as the first stop for Portuguese slave traders on their way from Africa.

This would have given the Rio Grande Islands, which I suspect would have been named something like Magellan, a diverse modern population with a shameful history much like, well, yeah. Anywhere else in the Americas, it is impossible to know whether these islands would have become part of Brazil or remained part of Portugal's cunning Atlantic island empire, perhaps they could even have been an independent nation, another member of that Lusosphere and I will be the first to know. I say I wish this existed, not because I care too much about the Portuguese-speaking world - let me be clear, I don't - but because every other continent besides South America already has its own associated islands.

North America has the Caribbean, Europe has Great Britain and Ireland. Africa has Madagascar East Asia has Japan Australia has New Zealand heck even India has Sri Lanka but what does South America get the Falklands? The rest of the Atlantic is actually quite boring since the Mid-Atlantic Ridge represents one of the cleanest tectonic brakes on the planet for To get more interesting, we will have to look up here, where the North American, Eurasian and African plates form a triple union in the ocean. This crowded tectonic zone has once again created openings in the crust. 4 magma to escape through accumulation. the Azores plateau at approximately 250,000 square kilometers producing the few scattered Azores islands as the oceanic rift continues to push the surrounding plates in three different directions, this landform will eventually split into three in the meantime, however, the activity Volcanic activity still present on some of the islands suggests that this landmass has not even finished being born, but eventually this brings us to the upper reaches of the Atlantic, where alongside the islands of Great Britain and Ireland there is a landmass equally massive called the rock, every plateau stretched by disintegration. of europe and greenland rocko represents the largest piece to break away from the ruined continental shelf despite being further north than most of britain or ireland rockwall lies directly in the path of the gulf stream that carries the warm Caribbean waters to here and Beyond this, we might expect Rockall to have a similar climate and landscape to its neighbors, probably with a colder, rockier north, but a warm, grassy south, considering that the Celts They came to Ireland.

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say it. This would have become another Celtic nation kept safely out of the reach of those damned Anglo-Saxons, of course, no matter how shocking any of these geographical features were, we know that in the end it was not meant to be for any of them the surface of The Earth is messy and no matter how much water there is here, there will always be more to discover, but hopefully now when you look at a map of the Earth you will see more than just land and sea. Hello everyone, thank you for watching this video.

A little longer than my usual video but judging by the fact that you're listening to me right now I'd say you thought it was fine, lucky for you even after 20 minutes I couldn't mention everything I wanted to so yeah I would like to see another video like this, so you can head over to my patreon to help me make these videos, if not maybe just subscribe to see my next video when it comes out, thanks.