Underwater continent near Australia. Is it Atlantis?
It is considered a sensational discovery: discovered huge underwater landscapes off Australia that still reveal a mosaic of human habitation and were probably home to thousands of people. A journey through time that bring us 65,000 years into the past.
Australia is one of the countries where researchers repeatedly discover something new: new animals or plants species, ancient fossils or fallen meteorites. Not every part of the continent has been explored, due to the size of the continent alone, almost 7.7 million square kilometers.
It is not a surprise therefore that the German explorer and naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt, who disappeared along with the rest of his expedition in 1848 during an attempt to cross the continent from east to west was never found, despite numerous search expeditions over the years.
Also the Australian's underwater world continually reveals secrets about which little was previously known.
In particular, beginning of this year a study published in the scientific journal Quaternary Science Reviews (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379123004663) conducted by archaeologist Kasih Norman of Griffith University in Queensland has revealed the existence of a lost continent, off the northern coast of Australia. The continent is approximately 70 million years old and it would have hosted up to half a million people. A rich ecosystem with impressive populations similar to those of today's cities.
About 1.6 times the size of the United Kingdom, it contained archipelagos, lakes, rivers and even a sea within it. The archipelagos were so large that they could be used as a bridge to reach Indonesia.
65,000 years ago the mainland Australia was still part of a single mega-continent called Sahul, which also included Tasmania and New Guinea. Back then, sea levels were significantly lower that today. The now-flooded northwest continental shelf connecting what is now the Kimberley region with western Arnhem Land in Australia was a vast, habitable landscape covering nearly 390,000 square kilometers - an area one and a half times larger than New Zealand today.
The sinking of the continent began around 18,000 thousand years ago, when the last glaciation ended and the ice begins to melt. The warming caused sea levels to rise and flood large parts of the world's continents. Many areas of the globe gave way to the sea, disappearing under water. This process then split Sahul into New Guinea and Australia and cut off Tasmania from the mainland.
Unlike the rest of the world, where there were some inhabited continental shelves that have since sunk, the Australian shelves were considered ecologically unproductive. For a long time it was believed that they were little used by Aboriginal Australians.
But early evidence already suggested that people did use the region. For example, stone tools were found on the seabed off the coast of the Pilbara region in Western Australia. Now the researchers were also able to show that the region was significantly more fertile than previously thought and that therefore probably significantly more people lived there.
The archipelago was formed between 70,000 and 61,000 years ago and remained stable for around 9,000 years. Thanks to the rich ecosystems of these islands, people may have gradually migrated from Indonesia to Australia and used the islands as respective stepping stones.
As the polar ice caps continued to expand during the last ice age and sea levels fell by up to 120 meters, the shelf was completely exposed for the first time in 100,000 years. For a long time it was not known what the landscapes that were exposed as a result of this looked like and have since been flooded again.
But the data from mapping the seabed revealed, in addition to the archipelagos, lakes, rivers and even a large inland sea. This inland sea, called Malita, is believed to have existed for 10,000 years (27,000 to 17,000 years ago) and covered an area of more than 18,000 square kilometers. Today's Sea of Marmara in Turkey is comparable in size.
“Our ecological modeling shows that between 50,000 and 500,000 people could have lived on the now flooded northwest shelf at various times over the last 65,000 years,” said the researchers. This conclusion is also supported by new genetic research suggesting large populations at this time.
When rising sea levels at the end of the last ice age flooded the shelf again and the water invaded once productive landscapes, people were forced to retreat. Apparently they moved to the Kimberley region as well as to what is now Arnhem Land in Australia.
Today the continent lies about 100 meters underwater in the Timor Sea, the part of the Indian Ocean that divides the island of Timor from the northwestern coast of Australia.
World newspapers have called this mysterious continent Atlantis. Is it possible that the Atlantean civilization had such a vast expansion that it reached as far as Australia? How did Plato know about the existence of this ancient content so distant from Greece and Egypt?
How did the ancient Atlanteans cross the oceans?
Could the theory that the Earth was once smaller and then increased in diameter over time be true?
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