Unearthing Europe’s Lost Continent

Welcome to Greater Adria, the never-before-seen island escape guaranteed to amaze and inspire. Nearly identical in size and shape to Greenland, it features an expansive tropical mainland bordered by a sun-soaked archipelago begging to be explored. Each of its myriad islands dots the Neo-Tethys Ocean like sprinkles on a cupcake, closely hugging the African and Eurasian coasts. Each is a paradise blessed with vast coral reefs and crystal-clear seas.

Greater Adria was likely this idyllic 240 million years ago, though even the most cutting-edge technology today cannot say for sure. Science has confirmed, however, that the continent now lies somewhere beneath southern Europe, shattered, melted, and crushed ever deeper into the earth's molten mantle, just beneath the cool, rocky crust.

The discovery is the culmination of a 10-year study by researchers at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. It was a challenge of mighty proportions; to put it simply, it demanded the assimilation of multiple forms of data gathered from countries spanning Europe to Asia regarding events that had happened almost a quarter of a billion years ago. Its massive scope was made possible by the development of all-new software as well as the gradual refinement of classic techniques like plate reconstruction.

The premise of plate reconstruction is straightforward: by examining geological hints embedded in the arrangement of continents today, a description of their positions in the past can be reverse-engineered. These cues are subtle but numerous; anything from the orientation of magnetic fields in rocks (paleomagnetism) to the suspiciously similar arrangement of fossils on continents now separated by oceans (biogeography) can point geoscientists in the right direction. Furthermore, the field of seismic tomography has matured significantly in recent years; it exploits the waves propagated by earthquakes or explosions to generate three-dimensional maps of rock slabs even as they descend more than 1800 miles below Earth’s surface.

The Utrecht researchers consolidated their data from such sources in a newly developed software called GPlates, which can both generate accurate plate reconstructions and condense million-year-long tectonic simulations down to a few minutes. The result, now available on YouTube, is strikingly simple yet elegant. At just three minutes long, it silently portrays Greater Adria’s grand formation by plate separation and demise by plate subduction.

According to the prevailing scientific hypothesis, Greater Adria was once part of Gondwana, the lower of two landmasses that split from the supercontinent of Pangaea as far back as one billion years ago. Gondwana eventually fragmented into the continents known today as South America, Australia, and Africa, among others. Some 240 million years ago, Greater Adria embarked on a journey of its own, rotating counterclockwise as it trudged at a gentle pace of three to four centimeters northward per year. At the peak of the reign of Earth’s largest-ever land animal, the herbivorous Argentinosaurus, Greater Adria collided with modern-day Europe in a cataclysmic blow that would destroy its 60-mile-thick crust and plunge the entire continent into Earth’s mantle.

The bulk of Greater Adria still lies in its original place under the Mediterranean Sea, its name only occasionally invoked in nominal connection with the Adriatic Sea. But unknowingly, the world has been interacting with the natural wonders it has left in its wake. The continent’s sedimentary rock has been dispersed far and wide, from Spain to Iran. The ore, metals, and minerals that it deposited as it sank now fuel the massive economies and even larger industries of modern European nations. Even the remnants of its upper layer, sliced off by the knife-like edge of the European plate, contributed to the formation of the Apennine Mountains, sealing off the Italian Peninsula and guarding the city-state of Rome as it evolved into one of Earth’s greatest empires.

Even though Greater Adria may no longer boast the status of a continent, the role that its ultimate sacrifice played in shaping the modern world can never be forgotten. It seems now that 100 million years after Greater Adria sank to its molten grave, technology is finally becoming powerful enough to wind back the geological clock, unearthing the secrets it kept in its better days as an island utopia.