Hello Zealandia

Explorers looking for a great southern continent came too late.

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The maps are wrong. Or, at least, incomplete. New Zealand is not a chain of islands strung along the coast of Australia; it doesn’t stop at the low-water mark. Rather, we sit on the exposed peaks of the not-quite sunken continent of Zealandia, a 4.9 million square kilometre continent, half the size of the United States, bulging out 1000km east of Christchurch over the Chatham Rise, stretching south across the Campbell Plateau, taking in the Challenger Rise to the west of Greymouth then extending north-west along the Lord Howe Rise to come nose to nose with Australia’s east coast. In its spread it encompasses New Zealand, Australia (Norfolk Island and Lord Howe Island) and the French territory of New Caledonia.

Of this, about 94% is under water. We always had a hunch it was there. Part of Captain James Cook’s task was to search for a Terra Australis Incognita, based on the fanciful notion that landmass in the north had to be balanced by something in the south. He searched in vain, sailing disappointedly over a landscape of canyons and plateaus. In 1857, colonist Charles Hursthouse surmised that New Zealand was part “of a great continent which has been submerged”. Half a century later, improved bathymetric (underwater topographic) maps showed New Zealand was not a few lumps of land jutting up from the deep ocean crust but part of a much larger plateau.