The Lost Continent Beneath The Pacific Ocean

If there's one thing that excites us more than the idea of alien planets, it's the thought of what might be waiting beneath the surface of the ocean. Cthulu? Snorks? The lost continent of Atlantis? Unfortunately, science is a big party-pooper that says that probably none of those are actually real. Except...there really is a lost continent in the Pacific Ocean, and its highest point is the only part that's breached the surface. You know it as New Zealand, but there's a whole lot more Zealand where that came from.

Looking For Atlantis

Sail west from Sydney and you'll find Zealandia. Sort of. You won't be able to see it (not most of it, anyway), but deep beneath the ocean is a chunk of land spread out over 4.9 million square kilometers (about 3 million square miles) that broke off from Australia about 75 million years ago. Generally, we don't think of land masses as being continents if they're underwater — actually, we often don't even consider them to be land masses. But Zealandia meets pretty much all of the criteria: elevation above the surrounding area, a distinctive geology, a well-defined area, and a crust much thicker than that found on the ocean floor.

In one of the most intensive explorations of a "lost continent" ever, the Australian National University has launched a drill ship to explore Zealandia. The mission of the JOIDES Resolution is to collect sediment from the continental crust beneath the ocean, and test our theories about how and when Zealandia formed. Scientists currently believe that it was once a part of Gondwana, the supercontinent that also included Australia, Antarctica, Africa, and South America. But it probably broke off about 75 million years ago, and over the course of about 20 million years gradually spread itself so thin that it sank like an Oreo in milk. With core samples and mineral deposits, scientists will be able to strengthen these theories — or throw them out entirely.

An Army Of Atlantises

We've actually had an idea of Zealandia's existence since about 1919 (when it was known as Tasmantis), but it's not the only sunken continent on the planet. Another, much smaller, leftover of the great Gondwana break-up was discovered in 2017 and named "Mauritia" after Mauritia, one of its only parts to actually break the surface.

There are quite a few more of these continental crumbs, in fact, but only Zealandia has been deemed big enough to actually be described as a continent. The others, including Mauritia, Madagascar, and a bunch of tiny underwater islands you've probably never heard of, have all been deemed "microcontinents" or "continental fragments." But we prefer to think of them all as Snork sanctuaries.

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If The Eatrh Core Is So Hot , Why Doesn't It Melt?

It's a mystery that has puzzled generations of scientists: at the very center of our planet, within a liquid outer core, is a Pluto-sized orb of solid iron. That's right, solid — even though it's nearly the same temperature as the surface of the sun. How is that possible? Swedish scientists think they know.

I Am Iron Cube.

The atoms in a solid block of iron are arranged in what's known as a crystal structure. Those structures look different, depending on temperature and pressure. At the normal temperatures and atmospheric pressures we know, iron takes on what's known as a body-centered cubic (BCC) phase—that classic cube shape with eight corner points and a center point. At extremely high pressures, though, iron's structure morphs into what's called a hexagonal close-packed (HCP) phase, with each point surrounded by 12 other points.

The pressure at Earth's core, you might imagine, is extremely high—3.5 million times higher than the pressure you experience up here on the surface. You might expect, then, that iron crystals would take on a hexagonal formation there. Scientists did too: they believed that a cube structure simply couldn't exist in those conditions. But for a study published in February 2017, scientists from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden crunched the numbers and came to a surprising conclusion.

Playing With A Full Deck.

The researchers used a massive supercomputer to analyze a large amount of data collected three years previous at Livermore Lawrence National Laboratory in California. They found that the core is indeed in a cube structure, thanks to the very extremes that scientists thought made it impossible. At normal temperatures, that cube structure is unstable, and its atomic "planes" easily slide out of the structure into a liquid state. But in the extremes of the core, atoms are moving so quickly, so close together, that they don't have anywhere to go. Like passengers on a packed subway car, they just switch positions, but maintain their original shape. 

"The sliding of these planes is a bit like shuffling a deck of cards," co-author Anatoly Belonoshko explains. "Even though the cards are put in different positions, the deck is still a deck. Likewise, the BCC iron retains its cubic structure."

This explains more than why Earth's core is solid. It also gives an explanation for why seismic waves (the kind that cause earthquakes) travel faster between the earth's poles than through the equator. The way that atoms move among this cubic structure adds "texture" to the iron the way wood has a grain, giving it a "preferred" direction. Knowing that and other details about the way our planet is structured can help us make important predictions for what might happen to it in the future.

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