Zealandia The Continent
Posted: February 18, 2017, 2:00 am
Kiwi's rejoice! You have your own continent. (Aussies cue up the sheep jokes....)
OK so since 1995 the phrase "Zealandia" has been around, but this week a paper was published by geologists that gets into exactly why Zealandia should now be considered a separate continent in it's own right.
https://www.geosociety.org/gsatoday/arc ... 321A.1.htm
I give you the first consideration they list:
OK so since 1995 the phrase "Zealandia" has been around, but this week a paper was published by geologists that gets into exactly why Zealandia should now be considered a separate continent in it's own right.
https://www.geosociety.org/gsatoday/arc ... 321A.1.htm
I give you the first consideration they list:
A Kiwi walks into his bedroom carrying a sheep in his arms and says: "Darling, this is the pig I have sex with when you have a headache." His girlfriend is lying in bed and replies: "I think you'll find that's not a pig but a sheep, you idiot." The man says: " Shut up, I wasn't talking to you."Zealandia as a Continent
New Zealand and New Caledonia are large, isolated islands in the southwest Pacific Ocean. They have never been regarded as part of the Australian continent, although the geographic term Australasia often is used for the collective land and islands of the southwest Pacific region. In the following sections, we summarize the four key attributes of continents and assess how Zealandia meets these criteria.
Elevation
Continents and their continental shelves vary in height but are always elevated relative to oceanic crust (Cogley, 1984). The elevation is a function of many features, fundamentally lithosphere density and thickness, as well as plate tectonics (e.g., Kearey et al., 2009). The existence of positive bathymetric features north and south of New Zealand has been known for more than a century (Farquhar, 1906). The accuracy and precision of seafloor mapping have improved greatly over the past decades (Brodie, 1964; Smith and Sandwell, 1997; Stagpoole, 2002) and a deliberately chosen color ramp on a satellite gravity-derived bathymetry map provides an excellent visualization of the extent of continental crust (Fig. 2). The approximate edge of Zealandia can be placed where the oceanic abyssal plains meet the base of the continental slope, at water depths between 2500 and 4000 m below sea level. The precise position of the foot of the continental slope around Zealandia was established during numerous surveys in support of New Zealand’s Law of the Sea submission (Wood et al., 2003; UNCLOS, 2008).
Zealandia is everywhere substantially elevated above the surrounding oceanic crust. The main difference with other continents is that it has much wider and deeper continental shelves than is usually the case (Fig. 1). Zealandia has a modal elevation of ~−1100 m (Cogley, 1984) and is ~94% submerged below current sea level. The highest point of Zealandia is Aoraki–Mount Cook at 3724 m.