New Zealand May Be the Tip of a Submerged Continent (theoutline.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report on The Outline: A group of geologists believe it is time to name a new continent. A paper published in the March/April edition of GSA Today, the journal for the Geological Society of America, lays out the case for Zealandia as the seventh and youngest geological continent. In the past, New Zealand was thought to be part of a collection of "islands, fragments, and slices," the authors wrote, but it's now understood to be part of a solid landmass. New Zealand is essentially the highest mountains of a 1.9 million square mile landmass that is 94 percent underwater, according to the paper. The authors believe it is both large and isolated enough to qualify as a continent. They note that it is elevated relative to the oceanic crust, as befits a continent, and its distinctiveness and thickness are also on par with continents one through six. What does it matter if Zealandia is officially a continent? Reclassifying the area would encourage geologists to include it in studies of comparative continental rifting and continent-ocean boundaries.

Comments

Re:Redefining words so we can make a "discovery"

[DrXym]

Just like planets, species etc. It comes from a desire to categorize things even though on occasions things cannot be categorized or the criteria for doing it doesn't work.

Re:Google Earth already had that info

[Freischutz]

In Google Earth you could always easily see a shallow landmass around New Zealand, so what's new here?

There are lots of interesting things abut this. For one thing it would be interesting to know exactly how much of this continent was above sea level during the last glacial maximum. The same goes for the Atlantic area. There are several islands in the Atlantic that are now either sunken, smaller than they were then or just reefs now but that would have been much larger during this period and could have served as stop-over points for people on a trans oceanic migration to N-America. There is a little flash App of the area that allows you to drop the sea levels: http://sahultime.monash.edu.au... Seems New Zealand was at least twice as big as it is today about 20k years ago and that it was surrounded by islands that are now sunken. Makes me wish could drop sea levels in Google Earth.

California

[DrYak]

I learned in school, 40 years ago, a continent is a big plate floating on the earth magma. That is actually a pretty strict definition. Plates are called "continental shelf", mere islands like Hawaii or Japan are not on a continental shelf.

No idea why the english/american wikipedia article disagrees, I guess because it is written by hobbyists?

The problem with this definition is that California would be on a different continent than the rest of the continental USA.
(The San Andreas fault separates the north american plate from the pacific plate)
So I suppose that's why everyday american-english wants to use different continent classifications than official scientific ?

And similarily. India is its own separate plate from the rest of eurasia. Also, traditionally europe and asia have been considered different continents, although they are on the same eurasian plate.

All in all, people have get used to some world view (list of continent), and it's hard to ask them to change as more details emerge and the scientific view shifts a bit.

(see: reptile and birds and mammals
in the common use : turtles and lizards are reptiles, the rest are not.
from an evolutionnary and classification point of view: if you include both turtles and lizards the thing you call "reptile" is such a big chunk of the tree, that birds and mammals appear actually inside of it as sub-branches)