Greater Adria: Hidden Continent Discovered By Researchers Under Europe

Researchers have discovered a continent under Europe, which broke off from North Africa and has been buried under Southern Europe for almost 140 million years.

The hidden continent which is of the size of Greenland is called Greater Adria. The continent was discovered when researchers were reconstructing the complex geology of the Mediterranean as it evolved.

According to researchers, it is possible that many people have set foot on the lost continent without even realizing it.

"Without realizing it, vast numbers of tourists spend their holiday each year on the lost continent of Greater Adria," Douwe van Hinsbergen, study author and professor of global tectonics and paleogeography at Utrecht University, told CNN.

"The deformed remnants of the top few kilometers of the lost continent can still be seen in the mountain ranges. The rest of the piece of the continental plate, which was about 100 km thick, plunged under Southern Europe into the earth's mantle, where we can still trace it with seismic waves up to a depth of 1,500 kilometers. Most mountain chains that we investigated originated from a single continent that separated from North Africa more than 200 million years ago," Van Hinsbergen further stated.

According to the study published this month in the Gondwana Research Journal titled "Orogenic architecture of the Mediterranean region and kinematic reconstruction of its tectonic evolution since the Triassic", the evolution of the continent can be seen from researching the evolution of mountain ranges.

Most of Greater Adria is underwater currently covered by coral reefs, sediments, and shallow seas. When Greater Adria was forced under Southern Europe, the rocks formed due to sediments were scraped, which later turned into mountain ranges that are visible in this region.

"Subduction, the plunging of one plate under the other, is the basic way in which mountain chains are formed," said Van Hinsbergen.

By restructuring the evolution, the researchers went back in time, peeling off the layers and changes, thus gaining a different look at how the continents looked back then. This required collaboration from 30 countries, including their geological surveys, their maps and pre-existing ideas on how the current complex geological structure may have been reached.

According to the study, Greater Adria separated from North Africa 200 million years ago and became its own continent. The restructuring and mapping also helped them identify several other smaller continental blocks along with Greater Adria, which are now parts of Romania, North Turkey, Armenia, etc.