Iceland Is the Tip of a Vast Lost Continent Beneath the Ocean's Surface, Scientists Propose

[Jilly_in_VA]

A vast sunken continent called “Icelandia” may exist under the North Atlantic Ocean, a finding that, if proven, could upend long-standing assumptions about the region’s geological history and inform the search for other submerged continents around the globe.

The proposed continent is estimated to extend for at least 230,000 square miles, reaching Greenland to the north and potentially Europe to the east. Iceland is the uppermost tip of this hidden continental mass, according to researchers led by Gillian Foulger, emeritus professor of geophysics at Durham University, who proposed the idea in the forthcoming book In the Footsteps of Warren B. Hamilton: New Ideas in Earth Science.

As exciting as it is to imagine this immense sunken landmass, Foulger and her colleagues emphasized that Icelandia remains a hypothesis that will need to be confirmed through a range of empirical methods such as deep drilling, geophysical surveys, and analysis of minerals such as zircon.

“The existence of Icelandia needs to be tested,” Foulger and her colleagues said in the chapter, adding that Icelandia is “a convenient example” to pioneer new methods and hypotheses that ”could be applied to other candidate sunken continents that are common in the oceans.”

https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkbvaz/iceland-is-the-tip-of-a-vast-lost-continent-beneath-the-oceans-surface-scientists-propose
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Fascinating to me because my dad was a physical geographer. I can imagine him being all over this stuff.

[kirkuchiyo]

1. ATLANTIS?!?!?!?!? nt

[Fiendish Thingy]

2. No one is suggesting a "lost civilization", only an undiscovered geological formation. Nt

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

3. Too bad the article doesn't give some sort of a hint

as to just how long ago that "continent" might have existed. We already know a lot about plate tectonics and how the continents have shifted over billions of years.

[Warpy]

4. Lost or emerging?

That's the big question. Continents have been drifting around on top of the liquid mantle for hundreds of millions of years, bumping together and splitting apart, building mountain ranges and then separating to create new oceans.

Geologists have been figuring out borders from chemical signatures of rocks along coastlines and in the interior in some cases. In the Pangea period, you could walk from Europe across Greenland to N. America, then volcanism rifted it all apart into the Eurasian plate and the N. American plate with the sea floor spreading apart between them. The next earlier was the Gondwan period, and the arrangement was different and I don't think that particular route was possible.

Given the large quakes along the Reykjanes Rise west of the island, I'd put my money on emerging. Iceland is a rift zone with a hot spot underneath it, so chances are that it's going to continue getting bigger, much bigger. We might not just be seeing a volcanic island full of people making their livings from fish, sheep, and tourism*, we might be seeing the creation of an entirely new continental plate.

*Oh yeah, and aluminum smelting. Big companies ship the ore there to be smelted in electric furnaces using geothermal energy generation. It's a lot cheaper to do it that way.