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Gondwana (/ ɡ ɒ n d ˈ w ɑː n ə /) [1] was a large landmass, sometimes referred to as a supercontinent.The remnants of Gondwana make up around two-thirds of today's continental area, including South America, Africa, Antarctica, Australia, Zealandia, Arabia, and the Indian Subcontinent.
Below is a list of European countries and dependencies by area in Europe. [1] As a continent , Europe's total geographical area is about 10 million square kilometres. [ 2 ] Transcontinental countries are ranked according to the size of their European part only, excluding Greece due to the not clearly defined boundaries of its islands between ...
Detail from a 1657 map showing the western coastline of Nova Zeelandia (on this map, north is at the bottom). The first European visitor to New Zealand, Dutch explorer Abel Tasman, named the islands Staten Land, believing they were part of the Staten Landt that Jacob Le Maire had sighted off the southern end of South America.
The natural history of New Zealand began when the landmass Zealandia – today an almost entirely submerged mass of continental crust with New Zealand and a few other islands peaking above sea level – broke away from the supercontinent Gondwana in the Cretaceous period. Before this time, Zealandia shared its past with Australia and Antarctica.
The landscape of the Middle Jurassic polar region has been reconstructed from the remains of forests exposed in New Zealand, which were between 70 and 80°S during the Jurassic. The vegetation was largely made up of conifers, cycads , and other gymnosperms , as well as ferns; on the forest floor grew lycopods , bryophytes , fungi, and algae.
New Zealand has three World Heritage Sites, [115] 13 national parks, 34 marine reserves, and thousands of scenic, historic, recreation and other reserves. [116] The Department of Conservation is responsible for managing 8.5 million hectares of public land (approximately 30% of New Zealand's total land area). [117]
New Zealand has been excluded from maps at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. in the United States, in IKEA stores, on the map of the board games Pandemic [4] and Risk, on the map of the 2014 Nuclear Security Summit in which Prime Minister of New Zealand John Key participated, at a world map seal at the United Nations ...
Its area is six times the area of the next-largest microcontinent, Madagascar, [6] and more than half the area of the Australian continent. Zealandia is more than twice the size of the largest intraoceanic large igneous province (LIP) in the world, the Ontong Java Plateau (approximately 1,900,000 km 2 or 730,000 sq mi), and the world's largest ...