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GSA Today Zealandia: Earth’s Hidden Continent Cover Image 2 GNS Science, P.O. Box 30368, Lower Hutt 5040, New Zealand 3 SGEES, Victoria University of Wellington, P.O. Box 600, Wellington 6140, New Zealand 4 Service Géologique de Nouvelle Calédonie, B.P. 465, Nouméa 98845, New Caledonia 5 School of Geosciences, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia Abstract A 4.9 Mkm 2 region of the southwest Pacific Ocean is made up of continental crust. The region has elevated bathymetry relative to surrounding oceanic crust, diverse and silica-rich rocks, and relatively thick and low-velocity crust...

The strange story of Sandy Island, the remote Pacific outcrop that never existed There is – in a very real sense of the familiar phrase – nothing to see here Sandy Island on a 1908 map The RV Southern Surveyor was sailing through the sunlight of a warm summer day when Dr Maria Seton noticed that something was wrong. November 22 2012 should have been an ordinary date in the diary for this doughty Australian research vessel, as it studied the lay-out of the seabed in the Coral Sea, some 900 miles east of mainland Queensland. But after a few minutes of confusion, the geologist on its deck ...

Most volcanoes either sit atop boundaries where tectonic plates meet, or above plumes where magma rises from the mantle with such heat it forces its way through the crust. However, some anomalies don't fit neatly into either category, most notably many former eruption sites across Eastern Australia. These may finally have been explained, and the same forces may be responsible for non-typical volcanoes elsewhere. It's at least 3,000 years since the Australian mainland experienced an eruption (although the memory of some of the later ones has survived). However, from Queensland to South Austral...

Loading video... VIDEO: Animation of tectonic plate movement and incidence of volcanoes over past 120 million years. Blue shading shows subducted material from the Pacific plate under the Australian plate. view more  Credit: The University of Sydney Australia's east coast is littered with the remnants of hundreds of volcanoes - the most recent just a few thousand years old - and scientists have been at a loss to explain why so many eruptions have occurred over the past 80 million years. Now, geoscientists at the University of Sydney have discovered why part of a stable continent like A...