Researchers have discovered a long-hidden continent — a gigantic mass the size of Greenland that has remained mostly buried under Southern Europe for almost 140 million years.

The hidden continent — dubbed “Greater Adria” by its finders at Utrecht University in the Netherlands — apparently separated from North Africa and ended up largely underwater.

It was discovered when the researchers were reconstructing the complex geology of the Mediterranean as it evolved, according to CNN.

The research was published this month in the scientific journal Gondwana Research.

The researchers said it is possible that many people have unknowingly set foot on Greater Adria.

“Forget Atlantis,” Douwe van Hinsbergen, study author and professor of global tectonics and paleogeography at Utrecht University, told the news outlet. “Without realizing it, vast numbers of tourists spend their holiday each year on the lost continent of Greater Adria.”

While most of Greater Adria is underwater, much of the hidden continent’s sedimentary pieces were scraped off during its great migration.

Those scrapings now comprise European mountain belts, including parts of the Alps, Greece and Turkey.

“It is quite simply a geological mess. Everything is curved, broken and stacked,” van Hinsbergen said. “Compared to this, the Himalayas, for example, represent a rather simple system.”

He said the research into the evolution of mountain chains can reveal details about the evolution of continents.

“Most mountain chains that we investigated originated from a single continent that separated from North Africa more than 200 million years ago,” van Hinsbergen said. “The only remaining part of this continent is a strip that runs from Turin via the Adriatic Sea to the heel of the boot that forms Italy.”

The researchers found that Greater Adria started to become its own continent during the Triassic period some 240 million years ago.

“From this mapping emerged the picture of Greater Adria, and several smaller continental blocks too, which now form parts of Romania, North Turkey or Armenia, for example,” van Hinsbergen told CNN.

“The deformed remnants of the top few kilometers of the lost continent can still be seen in the mountain ranges. The rest of the piece of continental plate, which was about 100 kilometers [62 miles] thick, plunged under Southern Europe into the Earth’s mantle, where we can still trace it with seismic waves up to a depth of 1,500 kilometers [932 miles].”

This isn’t the first time a lost continent has been discovered.

In January 2017, researchers announced the discovery of a lost continent left over from the supercontinent Gondwana, which began disintegrating 200 million years ago.

The lava-covered leftover piece is now under Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean.

And in September 2017, another research team found the lost continent of Zealandia through ocean drilling in the South Pacific, where it sits two-thirds of a mile under the sea.