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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.
Same as if you go to the grocery shop and buy "1 kg" (vulgar language) of potatoes, when what you're buying is "1 kp" of potatoes.
That is incorrect. You are buying 1kg (mass, amount of substance) of potatoes, not 1kp (amount of force exerted by Earth's gravity on 1kg of substance). The balance in the grocery shop might use measurement of 1kp force to verify that you are taking 1kg of potatoes, but that is the end of 1kp use. You leave the shop with 1kg of potatoes.
There is no clear, universally agreed definition of what a continent is.
There is only one solution: we need an international committee to define what a continent is, and then decide that NZ is a dwarf continent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uBcq1x7P34
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.
Just like planets, species etc.
Ceres and Pluto suggested we call it a dwarf continent.