The Lost Continent

There have always been people around with a knack for making land masses seem curious. Here are two such tales.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of
the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all
of these amazing tales right there on display, just waiting
for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

(00:36):
For a certain part of the population, nothing says childhood
nostalgia like Saturday Morning cartoons. Most of us have fond
memories of pouring a big bowl of cereal, sitting in
front of the TV, and watching our favorite shows. For
many kids of the early sixties, that Saturday morning ritual
was centered around a flying squirrel and his moose. Best friend.

(00:57):
Rocky and Bullwinkle was a cartoon created by Ward that
chronicled the exploits of Rocky, a flying squirrel, and the
moronic moose Bullwinkle. The show was characterized by zeny humor
and wordplay, poking fun at American politics and anti communist sensibilities. However,
creator Jay Ward never expected his little show to land

(01:19):
him in the middle of a real life Cold War crisis.
In an early episode of the show, Bullwinkle takes Rocky
to visit his home, a tiny island right on the
Canadian border called Musylvania, damp, cold, and with no permanent population.
Neither the US nor Canada wants to Claimmusylvania as their own,
leaving Bullwinkle as its governor. After the episode aired, fan

(01:42):
mail came in from across the country begging to visit
the real Musylvania, which gave creator Jay Ward a great idea.
In nineteen sixty two, Jay asked his publicist Howard Brandy
for help with the scheme to drum up publicity for
the next season of Rocky and Bullwinkle. Phase one, they
would lease a small island in a lake on the
Canadian border. Phase two, they would travel around the country

(02:05):
gathering signatures and support. Phase three, they would petition President
John F. Kennedy to annex the island from Canada and
Makemosylvania America's fifty first state. Howard immediately said yes. Once
the island was leased, Jay and Howard loaded into a
multicolored van and set out on the campaign trail. At

(02:26):
each stop, Jay and Howard rolled into town while blasting
circus music. They would give grand speeches about how the
residents of Musylvania, who need I remind you did not exist,
were sick of being passed over for other territories like
Alaska and Hawaii. They laid out some of the finer
tenants of the Musylvania Manifesto, like how Musylvania demanded aid

(02:48):
from the United States to the tune of exactly eighteen
billion dollars and four cents. Then they would encourage residents
to sign a petition for statehood to be delivered to
the White House. After stopping in over fifty cities, driving
thousands of miles, and collecting more signatures than they could count,
the big day had finally arrived. On October twenty seventh

(03:09):
of nineteen sixty two, Jay Ward and Howard Brandy arrived
at the White House. Jay was in rare form, blasting
silly music and dressed in a Napoleon costume. When he
was stopped at the gate by Secret Service, he declared
that they were there to see President Kennedy to petition
him for Musylvania statehood. When he was asked to leave,
he replied that he would not, as of course, he

(03:31):
had diplomatic immunity. To Jay's surprise, this caused the Secret
Service agent to pull out his gun. You see, what
Jay and Howard didn't know is that they had picked
the worst possible day to show up unannounced at the
White House. Just a few days earlier, on October fourteenth
of nineteen sixty two, an American spy plane had spotted
nuclear missile sites hidden in Cuba. This had kicked off

(03:54):
the Cuban Missile Crisis, thirteen of the tensest days in
American history. At that very moment, moment, America was as
close as it had ever been to a full scale
nuclear war with Russia. What's worse, that very morning, an
American pilot was shot down and killed over Cuba. As
Jay and Howard rolled up to the White House gates
to demand statehood for Musylvania, President Kennedy was weighing whether

(04:18):
to declare war. The Secret Service sent Jay and Howard packing,
much to Jay's disappointment, as he later said he thought
that President Kennedy had a sense of humor. It wasn't
until after they left that they learned just how serious
the situation was. The crisis was resolved peacefully the next day,
when the US promised to remove missiles from Turkey and

(04:38):
the Soviets promised to do the same in Cuba. For
their part, Jay and Howard never did get Mussylvania declared
the fifty first state, and in all honesty, maybe it's
better they didn't. The country had just survived the Cuban
missile crisis. With j Ward's sense of humor, it wouldn't
be long before he declared a musil crisis of his own.

(05:12):
If you've spent any time with jigsaw puzzles, you know
the satisfaction that comes from the last piece falling into place,
and you may also have experienced that uniquely horrible frustration
that comes when it doesn't, When you reach into the
box and find that the final piece is missing. This
discovery is usually followed by a frantic search. You check

(05:32):
the floor, under the couch, inside the cushions, the pockets
of your hoodie. You wonder if your dog ate it,
or if some psychopath walked off with the final piece
just to torment you. But in the end, the reason
it's gone doesn't matter. The puzzle is incomplete, and from
now on you will be too. Okay, maybe that's a
bit dramatic, but it's hard to deny that there's something

(05:53):
about the human mind that gravitates toward puzzles and hates
leaving them unfinished. Well in nineteen twelve, that in distinct
drove the German scientist Alfred Wigner to look at a
model globe and see something no one else had. He
realized that the continent's edges fit together, suggesting that they
had once been part of a single land mass. Geologists
now refer to this sea shaped super continent as Pangaea.

(06:17):
In our planet's early history, it comprised virtually all of
the land on Earth, but around two hundred million years ago,
shifting tectonic plates caused the land mass to split apart
into the continents that we have today. It's taken a
lot of work, but geologists now have a pretty accurate
picture of how it all fit together. This knowledge has
ramifications for countless other fields, explaining things about the Earth's climate,

(06:41):
biodiversity of plant and animal life, and where ore deposits exist.
So it would seem that scientists have completed the puzzle,
so to speak, But for decades there was one glaring problem,
a missing piece. It seemed that there was a continent
roughly the width of the United States that was nowhere
to be found. You know, it existed due to a
massive underwater basin off the northwestern shore of Australia. This

(07:05):
basin is called the Argo Abyssle Plane, and it led
geologists to dub the missing continent our Goland. They believe
that around one hundred and fifty five million years ago,
our Goland broke off from the super continent and drifted
toward modern Southeast Asia. At that point, it seems to
have vanished. And that's a massive problem because if continents

(07:26):
can simply disappear, it undermines everything we know about Pangaea
and plate tectonics. That's why around twenty sixteen, a team
of Dutch researchers embarked on an expedition to find the
lost continent. They initially wondered if the continent had sunk
beneath the ocean. If that were true, they expected to
find it beneath the islands of Southeast Asia, but it

(07:47):
wasn't there. Next, they considered whether another continent could have
slid on top of our Goland, burying it beneath the
Earth's crust. That's what happened to Greater Adria, an ancient
continent that now lies underneath the Europe, but based on
the available evidence, it didn't seem to be the case
for our Goland. The team didn't give up, though. For
seven years they tested rock samples from around the world,

(08:10):
and in twenty twenty three they announced a groundbreaking discovery.
Our Goland didn't sink beneath the waves or into the
Earth's mantle. Instead, it broke up into countless smaller fragments
that eventually got folded in with other land masses. The
team found pieces of the lost continent scattered throughout the
jungles of Indonesia and Mayanmar, which means that the final

(08:31):
puzzle piece has been found. We can all rest a
bit easier knowing that the bedrock theories of modern geology
are still in place. Scientists can still reasonably construct what
the Earth looked like in the distant past, and ironically
that knowledge can help them predict what it will look
like in the future. Because the continents are still shifting.

(08:52):
Instead of drifting apart, they're pulling closer together. Eventually they
will reform into a new supercontinent, and like Pangaea, that
future land masks will eventually break up all over again,
although what happens after that is a puzzle for another day.

(09:12):
I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet
of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn
more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com.
The show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership
with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show
called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show,

(09:35):
and you can learn all about it over at the
Worldoflore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.