Finding possible geological incongruities

Question

For reasons, a cosmic corrective force known as the Equilibrium Hivemind awakens on modern day Earth. Viewing the current Korean Peninsula as the anomaly activating it, it forcefully transforms the peninsula by adding more landmass in it:

Below this picture, the blue marker represents the general boundary of the newly added landmass. The landmass is teleported instantly into its position:

The added landmass is entirely a grassy flatland occasionally dotted with mountains and completely lacking in fossils and bodies of water of any kind. The ground is perfectly and absolutely even with no deviation asides from the mountains. The Equilibrium Hivemind doesn't want to exhaust itself in simulating a plausible billion years-spanning geological history for the added landmass so it designs the landmass to have seemingly never been touched by any lifeforms and most natural phenomena.

To not upset its perceived balance any further, the Equilibrium Hivemind creates a global Mandela Effect that informs the entire world that East Asia has always been like this without editing the world's history as much as possible. Every written, recorded, and drawn reference of the former Koreas are edited with this in mind. Basically, assume the world has always inexplicably treated this new Korea as the default. Only now, people are starting to note the oddities. Furthermore, the ensuing calamities caused by the teleported landmass is also removed of by the Equilibrium Hivemind so that the world doesn't experience even more deviations it needs to fix. Any casualties regardless of its countermeasures are simply erased from the global memory.

From the perspective of geologists and related technical experts who've had their memories edited, would this new Korea be an anomaly to their expertise such that it prompts greater analysis? In other words: Using our current knowledge and theories of geology, would the landmass seem contradictory and incongruous to an extreme degree?

Answer 1

Scientists Would Know Pretty Quick Something Was Up

Unless the the Equilibrium Hivemind also screwed with our understanding of the theories of evolution, migration, and god-knows-what-else, we'd figure out pretty quick something was up with a huge area that had no animals/insects/birds/people in it at all, yet seems perfectly habitable. In The Invaders by Pat Shipman, Shipman talks about migration speeds of hominids into new areas and invasive species in general. The gist is, if we can live there, we GET there. The same goes for every other species on the planet. It's pretty quick over geologic time, but takes a few hundred to a few thousand years depending on the animal and the location. But the facts are we have have a grassy flatland with.... nothing in it. There's never BEEN anything in it. A person could walk from one end to to the other of this nice-seeming area in a matter of weeks. But nobody ever did? OR any other animal? Scientists would note that fact pretty quickly, and while they might be considered crackpots the evidence of new species (to include humans) moving in as fast as they can into regions they're perfectly capable of existing in.

OR

A near-perfectly flat grassland with no water features at all MAY (not being familiar enough with ocean currents and weather patterns and all the other factors) turn to dead grass and nothing much else more quickly than natural processes can reliably irrigate said grassland. In which case current spy satellites would see this "perfectly normal" area die back for no reason whatsoever. Which admittedly might be blamed on global warming but desertification in a matter of weeks would also raise a ton of alarms in the scientific community. Which would then go "why now?" and find no real reason for it (because it's worked like this forever and... now you mention it that is odd). Again what the world would do is more a sociological theoretical than something I can answer.

Either way I don't know if/how long it would take humanity as a whole to admit something happened. But the experts would spend from now until they meet the Hivemind theorizing.

Answer 2

It would be highly anomalous (depending to what extent the hive mind decided to cover it's tracks).

All of the rock in the new landmass would (presumably) have been formed for the purpose of infilling part of the sea of Japan. Radiometric dating of the minerals in these rocks would show that they had all formed very recently at more or less the same time.

Unless great care was taken over the shape, placement and composition of these "grassy flatlands dotted with mountains" they could also be anomalous showing incongruous rock types, the wrong sedimentation patterns and a vast and presumably a very deep and sudden fault line surrounding all of the new territory.

Answer 3

Given this added landmass theories on geology and geography, many of which (while finally compiled for the English speaking world by Europeans) are based on initial observations by ancient Chinese scholars, will differ from our current understanding of our world such that no-one will ever notice any difference/anomaly at all.

You can't change something so fundamentally without it effecting all observational science. Yes there are many, many, ways that this would make absolutely no sense to an inter-dimensional traveller from our world but to a native it would be a fact of their reality and that reality would have affected their worldview such that "oh yeah that area is a bit unique, we can't quite account for it" but that's the way the world is. There are a number of areas and phenomena in the geology and geography of our modern world that we still can't fully explain as well.

Answer 4

Korea is already pretty anomalous. It has three volcanoes and yet is is quite far from a plate boundary. See, for example Jeju island. Maybe the Equilibrium Hivemind has already been?

That region on the map is pretty deep. Some parts need to rise by 1 km to make new land. On the other side, the Yellow Sea has an average depth of less than 50 m. The Philippine plate is going under this region, so it would not be unreasonable for it to rise slowly.

I suppose anything with godlike powers to alter the Earth and everyone's memories can pretty much do what they want. But why? They could just cause the change they want on the other side.