Scientists Have Mapped “Zealandia”: Earth’s Sunken 8th Continent

It seems New Zealand may be just the tip of a lost two million square mile continent that a new study in the journal Tectonics proposes is Earth’s mostly-submerged eighth continent. Not to be lumped together with Australia as New Zealand currently is, “Zealandia is distinct from the continent of Australia in spite of their relative proximity.”

The scientists behind the study also offer a reminder that New Zealand and its neighboring island cluster, New Caledonia, “have never been regarded as part of the Australian continent, although the geographic term Australasia often is used for the collective land and islands of the southwest Pacific region.”

While this area has been studied since 2017 and yielded a “treasure trove of fossils,” the new research proposing it as an 8th continent is relatively new. If the debate about planets in our solar system (Pluto vs. Planet X) is any indication, this discovery may too spark a century-long argument.