Zealandia and Lemuria

Or the Sisterhood of the Traveling Lost Continents

Hey you history lovers!

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The recent news that the team at GNS Science in New Zealand has fully mapped Te Riu-a-Māui Zealandia (Zealandia for short), Earth’s 8th continent, has brought renewed interest in last lost continent, and is a convenient time to look at the Pacific’s other more mythical lost continent, Lemuria.

GNS Science called the discovery of Zealandia an important “missing piece of the Gondwana jigsaw puzzle.” That its existence provides a more complete look at Gondwana, the supercontinent from which most of Asia and Oceania formed.

GNS Science’s map of Te Riu-a-Māui Zealandia.

As they described the movement of Zealandia:

At about 100 million years ago (during the Cretaceous geological period), the Zealandia part of the Gondwana crust started to stretch like pizza dough. Eventually Zealandia broke off as its own continental piece, and oceanic crust formed to fill the gap between Zealandia and the still-joined Antarctica and Australia. With time, Zealandia moved north and sank under the ocean. The land area got smaller as the advancing seas carved a flat marine surface across most of the continent. About 25 million years ago (at the beginning of the Miocene geological period) the Pacific-Australian Plate boundary cut Zealandia in half. Mountains and volcanoes formed again and land area increased. Today, most of Zealandia sits hidden underwater, with only the islands of New Zealand and New Caledonia visible above the ocean surface.

The Zealandia story shows how an actual continent forms, falls apart, and then gets rediscovered. With the GNS Science folks proving what goes into discovering a “lost continent” such as decades of core sampling, plate tectonic modeling, and other science-y stuff to raise a continent from the sunken depths of the ocean.

Having been studying and researching the other lost Pacific Continent, Lemuria/Mu, for years now, this offers the opportunity to compare a real lost continent to a fake one. Especially since some of the scientific discourse around Zealandia mirrored that around Lemuria in the late 18th/early 19th centuries and the debate surrounding how lemurs arrived onto Madagascar, which is still raging to this day.

This has not meant that Zealandia already hasn’t been Lemuria-ized. You can treat yourself on YouTube to speculative alternate history videos and others with clickbait-y titles that have garnered millions of views.

Part of the great bond that Lemuria and Zealandia share is their shared history in the world of plate tectonics. Zealandia was given birth to thanks to plate tectonics and the breakup of the chunk of Zealandia away from Australia and Antarctica tens of millions of years ago. This led to its creation but also its demise as the continental crust thinned out as a result of the shifting of continents.

Lemuria was present at the beginning of the idea of plate tectonics, when Alfred Wegener first proposed the theory of continental drift, where he referred to the collision of India into Asia as the Lemurian Compression.

Alternative thinkers like Helena Blavatsky, co-founder of Theosophy, Harvey Spencer Lewis, founder of the Ancient and Mystical Order of Rosae Crucis, and Mu-ist Col. James Churchward all put forth their own geological histories behind Lemuria that to one extent or another helped to cement the existence of Lemuria in the minds of some.

For Blavatsky in her massive tome The Secret Doctrine, Lemuria was formed out of a super-continent, a precursor of sorts to Pangea, that slowly transformed into along with the inhabitants on Lemuria into a continent of its own. Only to be destroyed tens of thousands of years ago.

While for Lewis, writing in the late 1920s and early 1930s as Wishar Spenle Cervé in the book Lemuria: The Lost Continent of the Pacific, put forth his own idea of a rather large Lemuria breaking away from Asia bumping into California and then submerging.

Series of maps from Cerve’s Lemuria: The Lost Continent of the Pacific.

Though Churchward never once referred to Lemuria in any of his books (The Lost Continent of Mu, The Children of Mu, etc.), his Mu was a Pacific island continent that was Lemuria in nearly every sense but name. The good Col. devised perhaps the most thorough and also confusing geological explanation for Mu and its destruction. All revolving around hidden gas chambers underneath the continent being compressed to the point of collapse taking with it the entire continent.

Mu’s gas pockets from Churchward’s The Lost Continent of Mu.

Definitely stay tuned to the work of GNS Science and updates for Zealandia in the years to come as more and more information will be learned from their discoveries. They are providing a great gateway to a scientific narrative around lost continents. One that Lemurian and Atlantian scholars could learn from when they go searching for their own lost continents.

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If that whetted your whistle for information about Lemuria, boy are you in luck! There is a whole book coming out in January from yours truly that dives into the history of Lemuria. Get this it’s called Lemuria: A True Story of Fake Place and you should probably pre-order it now.