Finding the lost continent
AS A TAXI whisked me into Townsville in tropical north Queensland, my eyes were drawn to the tallest object on the skyline: a drilling derrick, seemingly out of place in the harbour.
I soon recognised it as part of the JOIDES Resolution, a one-of-a-kind research ship equipped to drill deep into the ocean floor and take core samples. This was the very ship that was shortly to take 30 scientists, including me, on a nine-week scientific expedition to probe the secrets of the newly named eighth continent of ‘Zealandia’.
This extraordinary event is the first time a new continent has been discovered since January 1820, when a Russian expedition, led by naval officers Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and Mikhail Lazarev, battled treacherous seas to reach an ice shelf along the coastline of Antarctica. In doing so, they became the first people ever to set eyes on the frozen southern realm.
Less dramatic, but perhaps more surprising, was the announcement by scientists in 2017 that Earth had an eighth modern-day continent. This one sank beneath the waves 85–60 million years ago and was originally bigger than the Indian subcontinent of today. The only vestiges of this land mass that remain above the ocean are New Zealand, New Caledonia and the Australian administered Norfolk Island.
Unknown to geologists, as much as 94 per cent of this continent – Earth’s smallest in the modern sense, with an area of continental crust
