New Zealand's striking landscape has been shaped by volcanic activity dating back over 500 million years. Video / Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum
A geologist who helped bring to light the lost continent that Aotearoa sits upon is set to share more fascinating insights about Te Riu-a-Māui/Zealandia, in a just-funded, two-year project.
Zealandia is the world's youngest, smallest, thinnest and most submerged continent, with about 94 per cent of it lying underwater.
If we drained the oceans, we could see it unfurling some 4.9 million sq km across the South Pacific.
Scientists had known about it for decades, but were reluctant to state, unequivocally, that the lost continent physically existed.
But it did: and for a relatively brief point in the Earth's history its sprawling mass once stood above the waves, dispersing animals and plants from here to New Caledonia and the east of Australia.
Most groups of dinosaurs, including the towering titanosaurs, roamed its rolling, mountainless, low-lying landscape.
Scientific papers and reports hinted at the presence of an eighth continent, spanning back to 1910, when improved bathymetric maps showed our country wasn't just a few chunks of land jutting from an otherwise deep bath of abyssal ocean crust.
By the mid-2000s, GNS Science geologists including Dr Hamish Campbell and Dr Nick Mortimer began publishing research describing Zealandia's physical boundaries and composition.
Yet it wasn't until 2017 that a paper, led by Mortimer, somehow made Zealandia a real place and instantly captured the world's attention, generating more than 16,000 news articles that reached nearly a billion people.
Now, Mortimer has been awarded a $100,000 James Cook Research Fellowship from Royal Society Te Apārangi to produce updated reviews of Zealandia's geological make-up and ancestry.
These will include a research publication for geoscientists, as well as a book explaining the continent's origins and discovery, alongside Māori perspectives.
GNS Science geologist Dr Nick Mortimer has received a $100,000 James Cook Fellowship from Royal Society Te Apārangi for a project focused on Te Riu-a-Māui/Zealandia. Photo / Supplied
"It has taken hundreds of years for the science behind the discovery of this continent to mature, and there is still much to explain and communicate about the continent's exploration, framework, and beginnings," Mortimer said.
Particularly, he said the funding would enable to write a much-needed update of his most cited research paper, published back in 2004.
"That paper is really showing its age: the illustrations are black and white and, 18 years ago, we were still very tentative about the viability of the Zealandia continent.
"Now, we are a lot more confident. Having Earth's eighth continent on the map explains so much about hazards, resources and biota."
During his fellowship, Mortimer will seek collaborators to bridge the physical sciences and mātauranga Māori, a body of knowledge that arrived here from Polynesia and developed in Aotearoa.
Zealandia is the planet's smallest continent. Photo / Supplied
"Māori history and traditions provide interesting parallels, timescales, and context for the scientific view of the continent, and vice-versa," he said.
"If I can find appropriately motivated colleagues, I'm looking forward to writing a jointly-authored book on scientific and Māori accounts of the exploration, discovery and origins of Aotearoa and Zealandia.
"Last but not least, it's another opportunity to explain and promote 'Te Riu-a-Māui', the Māori name for our continent."
Results from his new project will be presented at public talks around the country.
Discovering our lost continent
1910s: New Zealand Plateau recognised as bathymetric maps became more accurate. The shallow water aspect was very important and first indicated that NZ was not surrounded by deep, abyssal oceanic crust. 1920s-1980s: The term "continental crust" is often used in scientific papers when describing geology in the region. 1995: A paper published by US marine geophysicist Bruce Luyendyk makes the first reference of Zealandia as a submerged continent, but only in passing. 2004-2008: First GNS Science papers describing Zealandia's boundaries and geology; Zealandia increasingly gets used in scientific literature as convenient term for the continent. 2014: Nick Mortimer and Hamish Campbell's book Zealandia: Our Continent Revealed is published. 2017: A paper led by Mortimer and published in a US journal is published and attracts massive publicity, finally acknowledging the existence of an eighth continent.
