QuilotoaTIL there is no agreement on how many continents there are.
Europe being on a different continent than Asia always seemed like bullshit. I can forgive the isthmuses, but Eurasia feels like it’s a thing to me.
WIZARD POPE💫Well by that logic then Europe ,Asia and Africa are all one continent. Just because someone dug a fucking suez ditch does not make them any less connected.
Since continent doesn’t have a strict definition, in my book, giving the isthmus of suez (and the isthmus of panama) a pass makes sense. Both of those were historically very difficult to traverse and not viable sustained trade routes compared to just sailing around them. Hell, there’s still not a road that links North and South America through the Darian Gap, which is wild to me considering what seems like should be a vital connection point bottleneck.
I understand “continent” a mercurial word and so people can define Europe and Asia as being different contients, but it does seem like it’s the only continental division that doesn’t make logical sense to me.
Well I guess. But there is a bridge across the suez and by a similar kind of logic you could split europe into 2 ‘continets’ because of the donau-main kanal. Same thing as the panama one as far as I am concerned.
I think of it more as if you were to give a pen to an alien child and said “draw a circle around the main landmasses on this planet” they would probably logically draw circles around North America, South America, Eurasia, Africa, Australia, and Antarctica. They wouldn’t look at the Ural Mountains or any sort of canal systems, just “these are the main blobs on this world map.”
But that’s just the way I think of continents.
I guess. But in my mind still main landmass would encompass anything connected to it. So if you were to look at the earth before we built all those canals there would be like 4 continents. I don’t personally think small things like a canal would be enough to actually separate 1 continent into 2. It would have to be quite a bit of distance for that to make sense. Like if the entire canal was the width and depth of the gulf of suez then yes, we have made a new continent.