What is Pacifis?
Pacifis is a phantom continent hypothesized to have once existed in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Its name comes from “Pacific,” and it is also called the “Pacific continent.”
A hypothesis born from the mystery of Polynesian culture
The Polynesian islands scattered across the vast Pacific, such as Hawaii, Tahiti, Easter Island and New Zealand, share very similar languages and cultures. Because it seemed unlikely that people could have migrated so far in small boats long ago, scholars in Britain and Russia separately proposed in the 1920s that a continent once linked the islands, and that it sank, leaving only its mountaintops as islands.
Did Pacifis really exist?
As geological surveys of the ocean floor progressed, no evidence of a sunken continent was found, and it became clear that Polynesians migrated from island to island with superb navigation skills. Today its existence is rejected. It closely resembles the theory of Mu, also said to have been in the Pacific, and is sometimes seen as a rehash of it.
