Every year, tourists vacation on a hidden continent without realizing its location. Discover the mystery in this intriguing video!

The history of Earth spans over 4.5 billion years, during which our planet has undergone numerous changes. It was only about 200 million years ago that the last supercontinent of Earth, Pangaea, began to break apart. Plate tectonics slowly moved the continents, shaping the world as we know it today, as noted by IFLScience.

The idea of continental drift was first proposed by German meteorologist Alfred Wegener in 1912. He suggested that the continents were once united in a supercontinent, which he named Pangaea. However, it took decades until the 1960s, when new technologies like sonar and magnetometers emerged, allowing scientists to explain the processes underlying the movement of the Earth's crust.

Since then, scientists have developed models of plate tectonics, incorporating new data and discovering new continents. In 2019, a group of researchers examined the Mediterranean region, which is also known for its geological complexity.

According to the lead author of the study, Professor of Global Tectonics and Paleogeography at Utrecht University's Department of Earth Sciences, Douwe van Hinsbergen, the results indicate that the Mediterranean region is entirely "bent, broken, and complex." He also added that several major fault lines can be traced in this area over a distance of more than 2000 kilometers.

During the study, the team investigated the area from Spain to Iran. The work took a total of 10 years, during which scientists managed to reconstruct the territory and found that southern Europe sits on a piece of continental crust the size of Greenland, which separated from Africa more than 200 million years ago.

Now, scientists claim that a vast number of tourists visit the lost continent of Greater Adria each year. Most of the lost continent has long since submerged into the Earth's mantle; however, parts of the crust, including sedimentary rocks, now form the Apennine Mountains, parts of the Alps, the Balkans, Greece, and Turkey.

According to van Hinsbergen, most of the mountain ranges studied actually originated from a single continent that separated from North Africa over 200 million years ago.

Researchers note that much of the continent is hardly visible, as coral reefs have settled on top of it. However, a small portion of the lost continent is still visible — it is a strip that stretches from Turin across the Adriatic Sea to the heel of the "boot" that forms Italy.