According to Serbian Economist, fragments of an ancient landmass that geologists call Greater Adria lie beneath the territories of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and other countries in Southern Europe, Nova reports, citing research by an international group of scientists.
Geologists view Greater Adria as an ancient continental block roughly the size of Greenland. It broke away from the supercontinent Gondwana, drifted northward for tens of millions of years, and then collided with Europe. As a result, most of this landmass was subducted into the Earth’s mantle, while individual fragments were “scraped off” and incorporated into the mountain systems of Southern Europe.
According to the reconstruction, remnants of Greater Adria can be found today in the geological structures of Italy, Greece, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Albania, as well as in other parts of the Mediterranean. This does not refer to a single, intact continent beneath the Balkans, but rather to fragments of the ancient continental crust that have been reshaped by the movement of lithospheric plates.
A key study on this topic was published in 2019 in the journal Gondwana Research. Scientists reconstructed the tectonic history of the Mediterranean region over the past 240 million years using paleomagnetic data, information on fault movement, and computer models of plate tectonics. The researchers analyzed data from thousands of geological sites in Southern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.
According to this reconstruction, Greater Adria began to separate from the northern part of Gondwana about 240 million years ago. It later drifted northward and collided with the southern edge of Europe approximately 120–100 million years ago. During the collision, a significant portion of the massif was subducted beneath Europe, while the upper layers were crumpled, uplifted, and incorporated into the region’s mountain belts.
It is this process that is associated with the formation of a number of mountain systems in Southern Europe and the Mediterranean, including parts of the Alps, the Apennines, the Dinaric Alps, the Balkan Mountains, Greece, and Turkey.
Similar “lost” or partially submerged continental blocks are known in other regions of the world as well. One of the most famous examples is Zealandia—a largely submerged continental mass of which New Zealand and New Caledonia are part.
Greater Adria became known to the general public following a 2019 publication, although individual fragments of its geological history had been studied for decades.
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