July 24, 2014 • 22 mins
There's something intoxicating about the notion of a lost continent. Imagine an entire landscape - perhaps even an entire civilization untouched by Western colonialism or perhaps lost beneath ancient, cataclysmic waves. But lost continents are far from mere whimsy and fictional fancy. Amid the dreams and occult whispers, reason and science emerge to dazzle the imagination.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas.
And this is the second part of a two part
series titled Lost Continent, where we are discussing the idea
of lost continents, sunken continents, sunken islands, lost civilizations. Um,
(00:28):
why this idea is so intoxicating for us The actual
science at work here as well as the pseudoscience and
the cult as the occultless nonsense you consider as well. Yeah,
and so let's get in a little bit of column
and calm be there with our next topic here, which
is Lamia. Yes, the Lemur king's rule the lands. You know,
(00:53):
if you if we hadn't researched it, and you just
mentioned Lamaria and I had no background on it whatsoever,
I don't think I would have thought of Lemurs. I
would have it instantly. It sounds hellenistic somehow, it sounds
it sounds exotic and magical. And I'm thinking that about
this this rich world, you know, like something out of
a you know, an early twentieth century pulp story where
(01:15):
there's you know, some sort of fantastic kingdom and and
maybe lemurs, but I'm I'm not picturing them as the
ruling class. Yeah, I just see them popping up around
the landscape with crowns on their heads. So the sad
thing here is that there are no lemur kings, no,
because you know, they don't lemurs don't need kings. They
have it pretty well situated there on that a gascar
(01:36):
where for the outside of the fassa, And of course
humans they don't really have much in the way of
natural adversaries, and they've they've they've had that, they've they've
experienced sort of a uh an evolutionary shangri law there.
But in eighteen seventy five, if you were trying to
figure out where these lemurs came from, you might come
up with a wacky theory, wacky hypothesis. Rather. Yeah, indeed,
(01:59):
you might look around at the some of the fossil
evidence and you see some and also just sort of
evolutionary evidence of similar forms in Africa, some maybe some
similar forms in India. And that leads us to Philip
Lute Lee slater Um. So slater is is again he's
tackling the same issue what's up with the lemurs? What's up?
What's up with the I I? What's up with some
(02:20):
of these other forms that are similar, such as the
lorist of Asia UH and the and the and other
forms found in say, Indonesia UH. And he ultimately observed
that quote, while thirty different species of lemurs are found
in Madagascar alone, all of Africa contains some eleven or twelve,
while the Indian region has only three. And again he's
(02:40):
drawing in some forms here there are not actually lemurs
in the modern sense of the world, but he's saying
these are similar forms. What's going on here? So eighteen
sixty four he pins an essay titled the Mammals of
Madagascar UH. Madagascar, of course, is pointed out as the
principal homeland of lemurs uh and UH. And he's saying
that this is to spread out all over Asian Africa
(03:01):
by a land bridge connecting uh these continents. So he's
speculating that this this connection might even have extended to America.
And we would have had this supposed land bridge slash continent,
and we would call this Maria. Yeah, and you also
have an a son. Five scientists Hackle and Blandford jumping
on this bandwagon, saying, yeah, there was a land bridge
(03:24):
and it connected this and then therefore that is why
they're all these lemurs or lemur like creatures populating the earth. Yeah,
and of course land bridges have existed. Uh, that's that's
that's not crazy theory in and in and of itself.
But we're talking about a rather sizeable land bridge here.
We're talking about a lost continent that would have us,
(03:45):
that would have bridged our modern continents together, Gone One,
a land which was supposed to have reached three quarters
of the way around the southern hemisphere with a gap
in the Pacific. And scientifically, these continents have little to
do with Atlantism, and even Gone want Aline is considered speculative,
although it's still widely accepted. So some of this Lameria
(04:07):
is connected to Atlantis as well in the idea of
the sort of genesis of how things came into being. Yeah,
and we see this sort of trend again and again
introduced the idea of a mysterious island, either as allegory
or near hypothesis, and other individuals are going to grasp
(04:29):
onto it. They're going to lift that idea up first, uh,
first with the polls of of of science, than with pseudoscience,
and eventually lofted high above us on the air of occultism, fiction, fantasy, dreaming,
and uh and at times insanity. Well, and but it's
just like the the idea of the Greek ideal of
symmetry had an interesting idea behind it, like there's got
(04:53):
to be another land mass over there to balance this out,
because there was an understanding of mass in this example,
there's want of an understanding that land masses have changed
over the years, right over deep time really, and there's
an understanding that animals could spread via that way, and
(05:14):
but there's not really an understanding of a speciation. So
it's kind of again, it's sort of like, Wow, they trying,
they're trying to tell the story of how this came
to be, and this is an explanation that makes sense
to them at that time with the information that they had. Now,
the problem with that is that you have the occult
is hanging out right, and you have a little bit
of information going on that's being extrapolated in a way
(05:36):
that is not right. And what happens is that Lameria
theory is picked up by Hellonia p. Blavotsky. She is
at that time in an influential occultist, and that's incorporated
into her U gaudy cosmos. That's how it's explained from
Natural History magazine. And it's also woven into Atlantis. As
(05:59):
I had said, and according to her works and those
of her disciples, the Lamians were the third root race,
gigantic ape like men, hermaphroditic and ouvi paris, with some
with something like four arms and a third eye in
the back of their heads. They interbred with animals, the
offspring being the ancestors of the apes. Their discovery of sex,
(06:22):
of which Madame Blovotsky took a poor view, caused their downfall.
Who Yeah, and they were succeeded by the Atlanteans, the
fourth root race and the ancestors of the modern mongoloids.
According to her, and both the third and fourth races
were full of cosmic consciousness. I love the idea that
(06:42):
even back in the day, this is the idea of
cosmic consciousness is being explored. That is phenomenal. I was
not up on this particular theory. Yeah, I know. When
I read that the theory, I was like, yeah, it's
not really a theory that I love the idea of
forearmed to maphrodic apes with a third eye in the
back of their head. It's wonderful whose downfall was sex,
(07:05):
which is just such a scientific line of reasoning. Right, Well, yeah,
I mean, well, maybe that's why they had the third eye, right,
and when they were so intosex, because they could do
it as much as they wanted and they could always
see behind them if someone else is walking into the room.
All right, So um, moving on from Limeria. Now that
we've again fully filled up the bathtub with occultist nonsense
(07:26):
on that count, then uh, let's look to the very
real world of lost continents. Uh. And indeed, if you
want to find a lost continent, you can't do any
better than to look back in time to the loss
super continent of Pangaea. I mean, in a sense still
with us, but it no longer exists in this form.
Now it's generally forgotten that Pangaea is just the latest
(07:50):
in a long line of about I don't know, something
like it does in super continents, and we're going to
see a lot more in the next two hundred and
fifty million years, and certainly in the whole five billion
more years we have left for the Sun exploits. But
Pangaia is the one that is most known to us
because we can imagine, we know what it looked like
we are and we can imagine it. We can imagine
(08:12):
our current configuration fitting into it. Yeah, I mean it's uh.
I've seen the analogy drawn. I think there's a House
Stuff Works article by Molly Edmonds that that is a
little bit of this. But imagine the continent of Pangia
super continent is formed much like a supergroup or any
kind of a really influential rock band. Right, first, one
(08:32):
guy gets together with another guy or gal uh, they
start playing drums together whatever. Then and somebody else joins
the band. Finally have the full band going on. It's
really great, and then they can't get along. They break up.
Maybe first one one band member leaves, in another leaves,
and suddenly everybody's doing side projects or their own solo work.
But then eventually they're gonna get back together. You know,
(08:52):
they're going to get back together if they're all still alive,
or even if they're not, because the money is just
too good, all right, So they're continually drifting apart and
drifting back together, albeit at the slowest rate like this
rock band. That's got to be immortal, right, because the
rate at which this happens is um It's something like
here here it is. To get some idea of how
(09:13):
slow it really has. Let your hair and fingernails grow
uncut for an entire year. Your fingernail growth represents the
slower pace of plate movement, while your hair growth is
the same as the absolute greatest distance any plate has
traveled in the last year. That's very insignificant. Yeah, I
mean we're talking the average rate of motion on these
(09:35):
these plates range from less than one to more than
fifteen centimeters per year. Now, just to give a quick
basic run through on what's happening with plate tectonics, the
Earth's outermost layer is fragmented into a dozen or more
large and small solid slabs called lithospheric plates or tectonic plates,
and they're moving relative to one another as they ride
(09:58):
a top hotter, more mobile mantle material. And these a
plate teconic cup processes have almost certainly been going on
since the formation of the Earth four point six billion
years ago. Yeah, and nearly all the world's earthquake and
volcanic activity will occur along or near boundaries between these plates.
So not only are you getting the drifting, but you're
(10:19):
also getting the collisions these plates colliding into one another.
And when they do that, they either create mountain ranges
or one plate will slip under the other and just
get subsumed into the to the molten lava. And most
of these scenarios will cause volcanic activity. So this is
(10:42):
where you see I wouldn't say it's see lost continents
happening because it's happening at such a small or tiny rate.
But here's this idea again that emerges that with all
of these dynamic changes happening into these continents, maybe there
is something going on. Now. To put this in sort
of the timeline of of the of all the thinking
(11:04):
that we've been discussing in this pair of podcasts, it
wasn't until nine that meteorologist Alfred Vegner hypothesized that our
seven continents had once been joined together as a super continent.
We've all this is just a straight up you know,
elementary school uh geography a puzzle. At this point, we've
all seen what happens when you take the continents out
(11:25):
of the puzzle board of the globe and placed them
next to each other. You can say, oh, well, this
corner fits here, this corner fits there. And indeed that's
what of that Veganer was was noticing here that the
borders of the continents matched up, they fit together almost
like a giant jigsaw puzzle. And then when you throw
in other clues such as matching rocks and fossils that
are found in countries separated by vast oceans, tropical plant
(11:47):
fossils that were found in polar regions, and vice versa,
it all, it all indicates that that that something's going
on here, that these continents were, in fact, uh once
linked together. But the idea of plate tectonics Lee didn't
come to the forefront ut of the nineteen sixties. So
it's a relatively new um spin on what's happening with
(12:07):
the continents, or a better understanding, I should say. So,
if you turn back the clock, can you start looking
for lost land masses or you know, land masses that
that either no longer exist or no longer exists anywhere
near the forum. I mean, you can go back four
billion years ago and you can find a plate building
blocks known as craton's, which are essentially giant rock cores
(12:28):
starting to rise up out of the primordial ocean um
and according according to a History of super Continents on
Planet Earth by Alistair Wilkins on I nine UH, there's
some evidence that two cratons date back to as much
as three point five billion years ago, forming the tiny
continent of Valbara. But there's there's a lot of speculation
(12:52):
involved in this. So there's there's the more certain candidate
for the oldest super continent would be a place called er,
which I like because or sounds a lot like Moo.
It's it's very it's very primordial, very primordial, and it
sounds like it would definitely pop up in an early
twentieth century pulp novel. But this craton, though, is behind
(13:13):
an idea of Mauritia, if I remember correctly, Yes, and
for for this idea, we need to visit Mauritius, which
is well known tourist destination, located about twelve hundred miles
or two thousand kilometers off the coast of Africa east
of matted Gascar and in Uh. In two thousand thirteen,
UM researchers found sand grains on the Mauritius beaches, and
(13:38):
they looked at these and they found that they contained
fragments of the mineral, the mineral zircon, and these were
between six hundred and sixty and two billion years old,
far older than the island itself. So yeah, they were like,
what how is that working? Yeah, so they stay theorized, well, okay,
sand grains must be the remnants then of Mauritia, a
(13:59):
law microcontinent that once existed off the coast of Africa,
and it was eventually submerged when India broke apart from
Madagas Gascar about eighty five million years ago. So the
thing is is that they had discovered that this area,
this crust, is much thicker than elsewhere. And the idea
(14:21):
is that instead of uh Mauritia being below in the ocean,
that is actually sort of been consumed in that land
mass itself. It is in the bottom reaches of of
that area, if that makes any sense, and it is
under the it is submerged under the Indian Indian Ocean.
(14:43):
But it's not like floating there, you know, three thousand
miles below right, Yeah, it's just kind of crunched down
if you will. And in fact, analysis of verse gravitational
fields has revealed other areas in the world's ocean where
the rock does appear to be thicker than normal and
could in theory be a sign of of other continental crusts.
So just basically like the land eating itself. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
(15:07):
I mean we just go we come back again and
get into this idea that that that the Earth is in,
our shape of the Earth is is just in continual change.
It's just the change that takes place in geologic time
and in deep time UM, and not the kind of
thing that we can really truly comprehend from our very
limited human perspective. Now, just to revisit Atlantis for a second. Uh.
(15:31):
In Josh Clark's article about Atlantis, he talks about a
city called Haliki, which may have been the blueprint for Atlantis,
or at least the allegory. And this is an area
that UM would have existed for about two hundred years
by the time plate I wrote about Atlantis, and it
(15:51):
had been submerged underwater. And it's a coastal city located
on the Gulf of Corinthine, Greece. Was once a seat
of power there controlled shipping in the area. It was
also a major site of worship of Poseidon, whom Plato
deemed the patron saint of Atlantis. And in three seventy
three b C, and major earthquake followed by tsunami washed
(16:15):
over the area and just completely wiped it out. So
what's interesting about this is that archaeologists have gone back
to this area and they said they've seen resettlement over
and over again, and they've seen that this Helliki Delta
was a really popular area to be in because these
three rivers formed a delta of the broad and fresh
water irrigated crops, and you had the coastal area, which
(16:38):
is always nice. It's always beautiful to residing in a
coastal area. Um And as soon as they started to
figure this out, they began to do some really heavy
duty excavation and in n archaeologists found a buried ancient
sea wall as well as ten Spartan ships that supposedly
came to try to help out after the tsunami UH
(17:00):
and then twelve ft beneath farmland they found ruins of
industrial buildings, kilns looms, a bust of Poseidon, and some
bronze age jugs. So looping this all back to this
idea of lost countinance in our desire to rediscover these
areas of civilization. Hliki is a great example of that.
(17:20):
And I think it's why it's so interesting to think
that this other area Mauritia, existed and perhaps there was
a civilization there. Um, and this idea that with all
of this stuff is just getting recycled over and over
again and is lost to us. Yeah, and and and certainly, uh,
I think there's a lot of love of the Apocalypse
(17:42):
pound up in all of this too. I mean, who,
it's great to hear about a wonderful civilization, but it's
even better in a way if we hear about the
civilization falling. You know, in the same way that we
look to our celebrities. We wanted to see them do well,
but we also really want them to fall. So we
can read about that too, because that's the the stuff
of great of great fiction. And so yeah, I can
(18:02):
well imagine that that Plato might would have known about
the places that have been wiped out, islands that had
where the civilization advantaged, or even the island itself had
had been lost, and say, hey, that's a great idea.
I'm going to use that. And when I'm writing, you're right,
because he was probably like, I'm going to talk about
this terrible moment in which the city was seized by
(18:23):
something and this, and then there's this idea that this,
uh this might exist frozen in time somewhere. And there
are other examples we can look to elsewhere in the
world where where there's a there there's a land math
that was once above the waters, but now it's below UH.
There's the Kurgouland Plateau, which is an underwater of volcanic
(18:44):
large Uh province, also a micro continent UH and submerged
continent in the Southern Indian Ocean lies about three three
thousand kilometers to the southwest of Australia and is nearly
three times the side of the Japan But to return
to mid Earth, one of my favorite examples here is Zeilandia,
(19:04):
which Zilandia and it sounds familiar if you're thinking of
New Zealand, well then spot on because Zoolandia is a
nearly submerged continental fragment that sank after breaking away from
Australia eighty five million years ago, having separated from Antarctica
between eighty five and one hundred thirty million years ago,
(19:25):
and it may have been completely submerged about twenty three
million years ago, and most of it, nine of it
remains submerged beneath the Pacific Ocean today. Um So, all
in all, we're talking about, you know, a land mass
that's uh three million, five hundred thousand kilometers square kilometers inside,
larger than Greenland or India, uh and almost half the
(19:48):
size of Australia. But the only part of it that's
really the main part really that's above uh the ocean
that's actually visible, that actually has people and plants and
and and is alive in that sense, is that New Zealand.
And New Zealand is only a hundred and three hundred
three thousand, four hundred and eighty three square miles or
two hundred sixty eight thousand, twenty one kilometers squared. That
(20:10):
through a lot of numbers and stuff out there, but
basically New Zealand is the tip of this iceberg and
the rest is is lost beneath the ocean. Yeah, we
mentioned earlier that the band has to get back together again, right,
the reunion show is inevitable even if all the remaining
members are no you are no longer alive and in
(20:32):
all likelihood based on our current understanding plate Ticonics. The
theory is that the continents will merge again to form
a new super continent within the next two hundred fifty
million years, and this will complete the latest turn of
the supercontinent cycle. And then they'll break up again and
do their solo projects. But then they'll get back together
again for an even greater reunion in some incomprehensible distant
(20:55):
future and who knows what that will look like. And
robotics Share will be out there, Robotic Share will be there, um,
and the great old ones will come back. Uh, there'll
be an alien colony and uh. And also those four
armed apes with the eye in the back of their head,
the Lamarans, we will be the dominant race center. Yeah.
There's also the astral projections. Yes, yeah, yeah, there's some
(21:18):
some of them probably escaped into the astral plane and
will come back, because who doesn't want to be around
for the super continent coming back again. They're just waiting
it out on the solar winds, my friend. Uh. So
there you have it, super Continents, Lost Continents, Lost Worlds, Atlantis,
all of the above wrapped up into two episodes. We
would love to hear what all of you have to
(21:38):
say about this. Yes, so let us know. Um, you
can always visit us at stuff toblave, mind dot com. Yes,
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cool video projects that we're putting out now and in
the future. Oh and that reminds me, Hey, guys, did
(22:02):
you know me that July is National Talk in an
Elevator Day? WHOA If you're talking one of these now,
we may choose to just listen. But I thought I
would bring that up because we have a handy dandy
playlist of the Information Elevator in which all these little
awkward um collisions between humans happens and information is dis first.
(22:22):
So if you want to check that out, make sure
you go to mind Stuff Show on YouTube so you
can check out the Information Elevator series. In the mean time,
please send us an email and you can do that
at below the mind at how stuff works dot com
for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does
it how stuff Works dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas.
And this is the second part of a two part
series titled Lost Continent, where we are discussing the idea
of lost continents, sunken continents, sunken islands, lost civilizations. Um,
(00:28):
why this idea is so intoxicating for us The actual
science at work here as well as the pseudoscience and
the cult as the occultless nonsense you consider as well. Yeah,
and so let's get in a little bit of column
and calm be there with our next topic here, which
is Lamia. Yes, the Lemur king's rule the lands. You know,
(00:53):
if you if we hadn't researched it, and you just
mentioned Lamaria and I had no background on it whatsoever,
I don't think I would have thought of Lemurs. I
would have it instantly. It sounds hellenistic somehow, it sounds
it sounds exotic and magical. And I'm thinking that about
this this rich world, you know, like something out of
a you know, an early twentieth century pulp story where
(01:15):
there's you know, some sort of fantastic kingdom and and
maybe lemurs, but I'm I'm not picturing them as the
ruling class. Yeah, I just see them popping up around
the landscape with crowns on their heads. So the sad
thing here is that there are no lemur kings, no,
because you know, they don't lemurs don't need kings. They
have it pretty well situated there on that a gascar
(01:36):
where for the outside of the fassa, And of course
humans they don't really have much in the way of
natural adversaries, and they've they've they've had that, they've they've
experienced sort of a uh an evolutionary shangri law there.
But in eighteen seventy five, if you were trying to
figure out where these lemurs came from, you might come
up with a wacky theory, wacky hypothesis. Rather. Yeah, indeed,
(01:59):
you might look around at the some of the fossil
evidence and you see some and also just sort of
evolutionary evidence of similar forms in Africa, some maybe some
similar forms in India. And that leads us to Philip
Lute Lee slater Um. So slater is is again he's
tackling the same issue what's up with the lemurs? What's up?
What's up with the I I? What's up with some
(02:20):
of these other forms that are similar, such as the
lorist of Asia UH and the and the and other
forms found in say, Indonesia UH. And he ultimately observed
that quote, while thirty different species of lemurs are found
in Madagascar alone, all of Africa contains some eleven or twelve,
while the Indian region has only three. And again he's
(02:40):
drawing in some forms here there are not actually lemurs
in the modern sense of the world, but he's saying
these are similar forms. What's going on here? So eighteen
sixty four he pins an essay titled the Mammals of
Madagascar UH. Madagascar, of course, is pointed out as the
principal homeland of lemurs uh and UH. And he's saying
that this is to spread out all over Asian Africa
(03:01):
by a land bridge connecting uh these continents. So he's
speculating that this this connection might even have extended to America.
And we would have had this supposed land bridge slash continent,
and we would call this Maria. Yeah, and you also
have an a son. Five scientists Hackle and Blandford jumping
on this bandwagon, saying, yeah, there was a land bridge
(03:24):
and it connected this and then therefore that is why
they're all these lemurs or lemur like creatures populating the earth. Yeah,
and of course land bridges have existed. Uh, that's that's
that's not crazy theory in and in and of itself.
But we're talking about a rather sizeable land bridge here.
We're talking about a lost continent that would have us,
(03:45):
that would have bridged our modern continents together, Gone One,
a land which was supposed to have reached three quarters
of the way around the southern hemisphere with a gap
in the Pacific. And scientifically, these continents have little to
do with Atlantism, and even Gone want Aline is considered speculative,
although it's still widely accepted. So some of this Lameria
(04:07):
is connected to Atlantis as well in the idea of
the sort of genesis of how things came into being. Yeah,
and we see this sort of trend again and again
introduced the idea of a mysterious island, either as allegory
or near hypothesis, and other individuals are going to grasp
(04:29):
onto it. They're going to lift that idea up first, uh,
first with the polls of of of science, than with pseudoscience,
and eventually lofted high above us on the air of occultism, fiction, fantasy, dreaming,
and uh and at times insanity. Well, and but it's
just like the the idea of the Greek ideal of
symmetry had an interesting idea behind it, like there's got
(04:53):
to be another land mass over there to balance this out,
because there was an understanding of mass in this example,
there's want of an understanding that land masses have changed
over the years, right over deep time really, and there's
an understanding that animals could spread via that way, and
(05:14):
but there's not really an understanding of a speciation. So
it's kind of again, it's sort of like, Wow, they trying,
they're trying to tell the story of how this came
to be, and this is an explanation that makes sense
to them at that time with the information that they had. Now,
the problem with that is that you have the occult
is hanging out right, and you have a little bit
of information going on that's being extrapolated in a way
(05:36):
that is not right. And what happens is that Lameria
theory is picked up by Hellonia p. Blavotsky. She is
at that time in an influential occultist, and that's incorporated
into her U gaudy cosmos. That's how it's explained from
Natural History magazine. And it's also woven into Atlantis. As
(05:59):
I had said, and according to her works and those
of her disciples, the Lamians were the third root race,
gigantic ape like men, hermaphroditic and ouvi paris, with some
with something like four arms and a third eye in
the back of their heads. They interbred with animals, the
offspring being the ancestors of the apes. Their discovery of sex,
(06:22):
of which Madame Blovotsky took a poor view, caused their downfall.
Who Yeah, and they were succeeded by the Atlanteans, the
fourth root race and the ancestors of the modern mongoloids.
According to her, and both the third and fourth races
were full of cosmic consciousness. I love the idea that
(06:42):
even back in the day, this is the idea of
cosmic consciousness is being explored. That is phenomenal. I was
not up on this particular theory. Yeah, I know. When
I read that the theory, I was like, yeah, it's
not really a theory that I love the idea of
forearmed to maphrodic apes with a third eye in the
back of their head. It's wonderful whose downfall was sex,
(07:05):
which is just such a scientific line of reasoning. Right, Well, yeah,
I mean, well, maybe that's why they had the third eye, right,
and when they were so intosex, because they could do
it as much as they wanted and they could always
see behind them if someone else is walking into the room.
All right, So um, moving on from Limeria. Now that
we've again fully filled up the bathtub with occultist nonsense
(07:26):
on that count, then uh, let's look to the very
real world of lost continents. Uh. And indeed, if you
want to find a lost continent, you can't do any
better than to look back in time to the loss
super continent of Pangaea. I mean, in a sense still
with us, but it no longer exists in this form.
Now it's generally forgotten that Pangaea is just the latest
(07:50):
in a long line of about I don't know, something
like it does in super continents, and we're going to
see a lot more in the next two hundred and
fifty million years, and certainly in the whole five billion
more years we have left for the Sun exploits. But
Pangaia is the one that is most known to us
because we can imagine, we know what it looked like
we are and we can imagine it. We can imagine
(08:12):
our current configuration fitting into it. Yeah, I mean it's uh.
I've seen the analogy drawn. I think there's a House
Stuff Works article by Molly Edmonds that that is a
little bit of this. But imagine the continent of Pangia
super continent is formed much like a supergroup or any
kind of a really influential rock band. Right, first, one
(08:32):
guy gets together with another guy or gal uh, they
start playing drums together whatever. Then and somebody else joins
the band. Finally have the full band going on. It's
really great, and then they can't get along. They break up.
Maybe first one one band member leaves, in another leaves,
and suddenly everybody's doing side projects or their own solo work.
But then eventually they're gonna get back together. You know,
(08:52):
they're going to get back together if they're all still alive,
or even if they're not, because the money is just
too good, all right, So they're continually drifting apart and
drifting back together, albeit at the slowest rate like this
rock band. That's got to be immortal, right, because the
rate at which this happens is um It's something like
here here it is. To get some idea of how
(09:13):
slow it really has. Let your hair and fingernails grow
uncut for an entire year. Your fingernail growth represents the
slower pace of plate movement, while your hair growth is
the same as the absolute greatest distance any plate has
traveled in the last year. That's very insignificant. Yeah, I
mean we're talking the average rate of motion on these
(09:35):
these plates range from less than one to more than
fifteen centimeters per year. Now, just to give a quick
basic run through on what's happening with plate tectonics, the
Earth's outermost layer is fragmented into a dozen or more
large and small solid slabs called lithospheric plates or tectonic plates,
and they're moving relative to one another as they ride
(09:58):
a top hotter, more mobile mantle material. And these a
plate teconic cup processes have almost certainly been going on
since the formation of the Earth four point six billion
years ago. Yeah, and nearly all the world's earthquake and
volcanic activity will occur along or near boundaries between these plates.
So not only are you getting the drifting, but you're
(10:19):
also getting the collisions these plates colliding into one another.
And when they do that, they either create mountain ranges
or one plate will slip under the other and just
get subsumed into the to the molten lava. And most
of these scenarios will cause volcanic activity. So this is
(10:42):
where you see I wouldn't say it's see lost continents
happening because it's happening at such a small or tiny rate.
But here's this idea again that emerges that with all
of these dynamic changes happening into these continents, maybe there
is something going on. Now. To put this in sort
of the timeline of of the of all the thinking
(11:04):
that we've been discussing in this pair of podcasts, it
wasn't until nine that meteorologist Alfred Vegner hypothesized that our
seven continents had once been joined together as a super continent.
We've all this is just a straight up you know,
elementary school uh geography a puzzle. At this point, we've
all seen what happens when you take the continents out
(11:25):
of the puzzle board of the globe and placed them
next to each other. You can say, oh, well, this
corner fits here, this corner fits there. And indeed that's
what of that Veganer was was noticing here that the
borders of the continents matched up, they fit together almost
like a giant jigsaw puzzle. And then when you throw
in other clues such as matching rocks and fossils that
are found in countries separated by vast oceans, tropical plant
(11:47):
fossils that were found in polar regions, and vice versa,
it all, it all indicates that that that something's going
on here, that these continents were, in fact, uh once
linked together. But the idea of plate tectonics Lee didn't
come to the forefront ut of the nineteen sixties. So
it's a relatively new um spin on what's happening with
(12:07):
the continents, or a better understanding, I should say. So,
if you turn back the clock, can you start looking
for lost land masses or you know, land masses that
that either no longer exist or no longer exists anywhere
near the forum. I mean, you can go back four
billion years ago and you can find a plate building
blocks known as craton's, which are essentially giant rock cores
(12:28):
starting to rise up out of the primordial ocean um
and according according to a History of super Continents on
Planet Earth by Alistair Wilkins on I nine UH, there's
some evidence that two cratons date back to as much
as three point five billion years ago, forming the tiny
continent of Valbara. But there's there's a lot of speculation
(12:52):
involved in this. So there's there's the more certain candidate
for the oldest super continent would be a place called er,
which I like because or sounds a lot like Moo.
It's it's very it's very primordial, very primordial, and it
sounds like it would definitely pop up in an early
twentieth century pulp novel. But this craton, though, is behind
(13:13):
an idea of Mauritia, if I remember correctly, Yes, and
for for this idea, we need to visit Mauritius, which
is well known tourist destination, located about twelve hundred miles
or two thousand kilometers off the coast of Africa east
of matted Gascar and in Uh. In two thousand thirteen,
UM researchers found sand grains on the Mauritius beaches, and
(13:38):
they looked at these and they found that they contained
fragments of the mineral, the mineral zircon, and these were
between six hundred and sixty and two billion years old,
far older than the island itself. So yeah, they were like,
what how is that working? Yeah, so they stay theorized, well, okay,
sand grains must be the remnants then of Mauritia, a
(13:59):
law microcontinent that once existed off the coast of Africa,
and it was eventually submerged when India broke apart from
Madagas Gascar about eighty five million years ago. So the
thing is is that they had discovered that this area,
this crust, is much thicker than elsewhere. And the idea
(14:21):
is that instead of uh Mauritia being below in the ocean,
that is actually sort of been consumed in that land
mass itself. It is in the bottom reaches of of
that area, if that makes any sense, and it is
under the it is submerged under the Indian Indian Ocean.
(14:43):
But it's not like floating there, you know, three thousand
miles below right, Yeah, it's just kind of crunched down
if you will. And in fact, analysis of verse gravitational
fields has revealed other areas in the world's ocean where
the rock does appear to be thicker than normal and
could in theory be a sign of of other continental crusts.
So just basically like the land eating itself. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
(15:07):
I mean we just go we come back again and
get into this idea that that that the Earth is in,
our shape of the Earth is is just in continual change.
It's just the change that takes place in geologic time
and in deep time UM, and not the kind of
thing that we can really truly comprehend from our very
limited human perspective. Now, just to revisit Atlantis for a second. Uh.
(15:31):
In Josh Clark's article about Atlantis, he talks about a
city called Haliki, which may have been the blueprint for Atlantis,
or at least the allegory. And this is an area
that UM would have existed for about two hundred years
by the time plate I wrote about Atlantis, and it
(15:51):
had been submerged underwater. And it's a coastal city located
on the Gulf of Corinthine, Greece. Was once a seat
of power there controlled shipping in the area. It was
also a major site of worship of Poseidon, whom Plato
deemed the patron saint of Atlantis. And in three seventy
three b C, and major earthquake followed by tsunami washed
(16:15):
over the area and just completely wiped it out. So
what's interesting about this is that archaeologists have gone back
to this area and they said they've seen resettlement over
and over again, and they've seen that this Helliki Delta
was a really popular area to be in because these
three rivers formed a delta of the broad and fresh
water irrigated crops, and you had the coastal area, which
(16:38):
is always nice. It's always beautiful to residing in a
coastal area. Um And as soon as they started to
figure this out, they began to do some really heavy
duty excavation and in n archaeologists found a buried ancient
sea wall as well as ten Spartan ships that supposedly
came to try to help out after the tsunami UH
(17:00):
and then twelve ft beneath farmland they found ruins of
industrial buildings, kilns looms, a bust of Poseidon, and some
bronze age jugs. So looping this all back to this
idea of lost countinance in our desire to rediscover these
areas of civilization. Hliki is a great example of that.
(17:20):
And I think it's why it's so interesting to think
that this other area Mauritia, existed and perhaps there was
a civilization there. Um, and this idea that with all
of this stuff is just getting recycled over and over
again and is lost to us. Yeah, and and and certainly, uh,
I think there's a lot of love of the Apocalypse
(17:42):
pound up in all of this too. I mean, who,
it's great to hear about a wonderful civilization, but it's
even better in a way if we hear about the
civilization falling. You know, in the same way that we
look to our celebrities. We wanted to see them do well,
but we also really want them to fall. So we
can read about that too, because that's the the stuff
of great of great fiction. And so yeah, I can
(18:02):
well imagine that that Plato might would have known about
the places that have been wiped out, islands that had
where the civilization advantaged, or even the island itself had
had been lost, and say, hey, that's a great idea.
I'm going to use that. And when I'm writing, you're right,
because he was probably like, I'm going to talk about
this terrible moment in which the city was seized by
(18:23):
something and this, and then there's this idea that this,
uh this might exist frozen in time somewhere. And there
are other examples we can look to elsewhere in the
world where where there's a there there's a land math
that was once above the waters, but now it's below UH.
There's the Kurgouland Plateau, which is an underwater of volcanic
(18:44):
large Uh province, also a micro continent UH and submerged
continent in the Southern Indian Ocean lies about three three
thousand kilometers to the southwest of Australia and is nearly
three times the side of the Japan But to return
to mid Earth, one of my favorite examples here is Zeilandia,
(19:04):
which Zilandia and it sounds familiar if you're thinking of
New Zealand, well then spot on because Zoolandia is a
nearly submerged continental fragment that sank after breaking away from
Australia eighty five million years ago, having separated from Antarctica
between eighty five and one hundred thirty million years ago,
(19:25):
and it may have been completely submerged about twenty three
million years ago, and most of it, nine of it
remains submerged beneath the Pacific Ocean today. Um So, all
in all, we're talking about, you know, a land mass
that's uh three million, five hundred thousand kilometers square kilometers inside,
larger than Greenland or India, uh and almost half the
(19:48):
size of Australia. But the only part of it that's
really the main part really that's above uh the ocean
that's actually visible, that actually has people and plants and
and and is alive in that sense, is that New Zealand.
And New Zealand is only a hundred and three hundred
three thousand, four hundred and eighty three square miles or
two hundred sixty eight thousand, twenty one kilometers squared. That
(20:10):
through a lot of numbers and stuff out there, but
basically New Zealand is the tip of this iceberg and
the rest is is lost beneath the ocean. Yeah, we
mentioned earlier that the band has to get back together again, right,
the reunion show is inevitable even if all the remaining
members are no you are no longer alive and in
(20:32):
all likelihood based on our current understanding plate Ticonics. The
theory is that the continents will merge again to form
a new super continent within the next two hundred fifty
million years, and this will complete the latest turn of
the supercontinent cycle. And then they'll break up again and
do their solo projects. But then they'll get back together
again for an even greater reunion in some incomprehensible distant
(20:55):
future and who knows what that will look like. And
robotics Share will be out there, Robotic Share will be there, um,
and the great old ones will come back. Uh, there'll
be an alien colony and uh. And also those four
armed apes with the eye in the back of their head,
the Lamarans, we will be the dominant race center. Yeah.
There's also the astral projections. Yes, yeah, yeah, there's some
(21:18):
some of them probably escaped into the astral plane and
will come back, because who doesn't want to be around
for the super continent coming back again. They're just waiting
it out on the solar winds, my friend. Uh. So
there you have it, super Continents, Lost Continents, Lost Worlds, Atlantis,
all of the above wrapped up into two episodes. We
would love to hear what all of you have to
(21:38):
say about this. Yes, so let us know. Um, you
can always visit us at stuff toblave, mind dot com. Yes,
as well as our various social media accounts where on Facebook,
We're on Twitter, We're on Tumbler, run Google Plus, our
YouTube accounties mind Stuff Show. Be sure to follow us
there so you can stay on top of all the
cool video projects that we're putting out now and in
the future. Oh and that reminds me, Hey, guys, did
(22:02):
you know me that July is National Talk in an
Elevator Day? WHOA If you're talking one of these now,
we may choose to just listen. But I thought I
would bring that up because we have a handy dandy
playlist of the Information Elevator in which all these little
awkward um collisions between humans happens and information is dis first.
(22:22):
So if you want to check that out, make sure
you go to mind Stuff Show on YouTube so you
can check out the Information Elevator series. In the mean time,
please send us an email and you can do that
at below the mind at how stuff works dot com
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