Forget the legendary lost continent of Atlantis. Geologists have reconstructed a nearly quarter-of-a-billion-year-long history of a vanished landmass that now lies submerged largely below southern Europe. ScienceMagArchives
Forget the legendary lost continent of Atlantis. Geologists have reconstructed, time slice by time slice, a nearly quarter-of-a-billion-year-long history of a vanished landmass that now lies submerged, not beneath an ocean somewhere, but largely below southern Europe.
The only visible remnants of the continent—known as Greater Adria—are limestones and other rocks found in the mountain ranges of southern Europe. Scientists believe these rocks started out as marine sediments and were later scraped off the landmass's surface and lifted up through the collision of tectonic plates. Yet the size, shape, and history of the original landmass—much of which lay beneath shallow tropical seas for millions of years—have been tough to reconstruct.
Another complication is that Greater Adria's rocks are dispersed across more than 30 countries, in a swath from Spain to Iran. So, like the rocks themselves, data have been scattered and thus are difficult to collect, van Hinsbergen says. And finally, he notes, until the past decade or so geologists haven't had the sophisticated software needed to perform such byzantine reconstructions."The Mediterranean region is quite simply a geological mess," he says.
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