[Rockhounds] Iceland may be the tip of a sunken continent

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

Iceland may be the last exposed remnant of a nearly Texas-size continent —
called Icelandia — that sank beneath the North Atlantic Ocean about 10
million years ago, according to a new theory proposed by an international
team of geophysicists and geologists.

The theory goes against long-standing ideas about the formation of Iceland
and the North Atlantic, but the researchers say the theory explains both
the geological features of the ocean floor and why *Earth*
<https://www.livescience.com/earth.html>'s crust beneath Iceland is so much
thicker than it should be. Outside experts not affiliated with the research
told Live Science they are skeptical that Icelandia exists based on the
evidence collected so far.

Even so, if geological studies prove the theory, the radical new idea of a
sunken continent could have implications for the ownership of any fuels
found beneath the seafloor, which under international law belong to a
country that can show their continental crust extends that far.

"The region that's got continental material underneath, it stretched from
*Greenland* <https://www.livescience.com/61602-greenland-facts.html> to
Scandinavia," said Gillian Foulger, lead author of "*Icelandia*
<https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/books/book/2323/chapter/130412282/Icelandia>,"
a chapter in the new book "In the Footsteps of Warren B. Hamilton: New
Ideas in Earth Science" (Geological Society of America, 2021) that
describes the new theory. "Some of it in the west and east has now sunk
below the surface of the water, but it's still standing higher than it
should. … If the sea level dropped 600 meters [2,000 feet], then we would
see a lot more land above the surface of the ocean," Foulger, an emeritus
professor of geophysics at Durham University in the United Kingdom, told
Live Science.

https://www.livescience.com/iceland-tip-of-lost-sunken-continent.html