You’d think that humans would have a pretty good understanding of our planet after 300,000 years. But as it turns out, scientists are constantly learning new things about Earth.
This year, scientists discovered Earth has a “pulse” that occurs roughly every 27.5 million years, which coincides with clusters of geographic events like marine extinctions and sea-level fluctuations.
Earlier this year, Internet denizens freaked out when National Geographic officially added the Southern Ocean — which surrounds Antarctica — to its map, even though scientists had already recognized it as the world’s fifth ocean for years.
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But in fact, scientists discovered a real new “ocean” near the Earth’s core back in 2014 — a reservoir of water three times the size of the world’s oceans combined.
In the future, this discovery could help confirm scientific theories that Earth’s water originated on our planet and not from comets or asteroids.
Speaking of the Earth’s core...
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“Had this remained on the surface as water, the Earth may never have known land, and life as we know it would never have evolved,” lead author Kei Hirose, a University of Tokyo professor, said at the time of discovery.
This huge, 2 million-square-mile continent remains mostly submerged beneath New Zealand. Geologists dubbed the continent “Zealandia” in the 1990s, though they updated the name in 2019 to reflect how the nation’s indigenous people, Māori, refer to it: “Te Riu-a-Māui/Zealandia.”
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In 2020, GNS Science (a geo-consulting organization) released the most accurate maps of Zealandia to date, helping us understand how tectonic plates and volcanoes shaped New Zealand’s geography.
Check it out for yourself and learn more about this lost continent here.