The lost Continent that took 375 years to discover

In 1642, Dutch explorer, Abel Tasman was confident of a sprawling continent in the Southern Hemisphere and determined to find it.

At this time, European explorers had no doubt about the existence of a vast land mass in this part of the world, which was surrounded at that time by a cloud of mystery. And they took the initiative to call it "Terra Australis", believing that it preserves the balance of their continent in the north. The roots of this interest in finding a continent in this region can be traced back to the Roman Empire.

In August of that year, Tasman sailed from Jakarta, Indonesia, where his company is based, with the crew of sailors aboard two ships and headed west, then south, then east and ended up on the island of New Zealand. The first encounter with the Maori people did not pass peacefully.

As soon as Tasman finished his mission without ever setting foot on the island, which he called "the Bay of Killers", and returned to the Netherlands after several weeks. He had thought he had discovered the Greater Southern Continent, although it was not the ideal commercial center he had envisioned.

Tasman was unaware that he had been right all along and that there was truly a lost continent.

In 2017, a team of geologists made headlines when they announced the discovery of the continent of Zealandia, which has an area of ​​4.9 million square kilometers, nearly six times the size of Madagascar.

By discovering the eighth continent, these scientists proved that encyclopedias, maps and search engines, which confirm that there are only seven continents, were wrong. The recently discovered continent is the smallest, thinnest and youngest continent in the world.

However, 94% of this continent is submerged under water, and only a few islands appear on the surface of the water, including New Zealand.

"It took a long time to discover this continent, although it was clear all the time," says Andy Tolloch, a biologist at the New Zealand government's GNS Science Research Institute, who was a member of the team that discovered Zealandia.

But this continent, which lies two kilometers below the surface of the water, remains shrouded in mystery. Scientists do not yet know how this continent was formed, the nature of the creatures that lived on its back, or even since when this continent sank?