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Zealandia love

Zealandia

Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • proper noun A nearly submerged continent or microcontinent that sank after breaking away from Australia many millions of years ago.

Etymologies

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  • ruzuzu commented on the word Zealandia

    Then in the 1960s, geologists finally agreed on a definition of what a continent is – broadly, a geological area with a high elevation, wide variety of rocks, and a thick crust. It also has to be big. "You just can't be a tiny piece," says |Nick| Mortimer. This gave geologists something to work with – if they could collect the evidence, they could prove that the eighth continent was real.

    Still, the mission stalled – discovering a continent is tricky and expensive, and Mortimer points out that there was no urgency. Then in 1995, the American geophysicist Bruce Luyendyk again described the region as a continent and suggested calling it Zealandia.

    -- "The missing continent it took 375 years to find" (https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210205-the-last-secrets-of-the-worlds-lost-continent)

    February 22, 2022