Scientists say they've finally mapped out Earth's "lost" eighth continent, Zealandia, or Te Riu-a-Māui.
Zealandia is two-thirds the size of Australia, but 95 percent of it is submerged below the southwest Pacific Ocean. Its only remnants are the islands of New Zealand.
Now, six years after the continent’s discovery, researchers have completed most of the mapping of its two million square miles.
Researchers revealed the news in a new study that was published in the journal Tectonics, which was led by New Zealand's GNS science research institute.
To support their study, they dredged up rock samples from the seabed of the northernmost tip of the submerged land mass in the Fairway Ridge, between Australia and New Caledonia.
Multiple types of rock samples were found, including sandstones at the outer margins, volcanic pebbles and basaltic lava. From there, scientists were able to identify magnetic anomalies and plot a map of the mostly undersea continent's geography.
But how did Zealandia come to be submerged?
A theory the science team at GNS subscribes to is that when the former supercontinent of Gondwana stretched out, its tectonic plates began to crack and allow ocean water in.
Then when Antarctica broke off, the crust of Zealandia thinned out until it became submerged, just leaving a few islands above the surface.
