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

[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.