bdonvrI mean it’s greatly exaggerated on Mercator but it’s definitely not tiny.
It’s bigger than Australia
ryannathansDoes that mean Australia is not the biggest island
Are continents islands?
damnthefilibusterThe Australia thing is something we were taught in high school.
I think I remember being told Greenland was the largest island, while Australia was a continent
Something to do with tectonic plates
Continents is a human made construct that’s later rationalized with tectonic plates and other criteria. Basically, people around the Mediterranean Sea divided the Mediterranean Coast into 3 parts and later extended this concept.
There is no agreed upon definition or set of continents globally
It might as well be a made up word
MinnesotaGoddamthe just be making up words now
MrVilliamno i’m doesn’t
All words are made up words…
dohpaz42Not all continents, no. Islands are bodies of land surrounded by water on all sides, no? Wouldn’t Antarctica and Australia then qualify by that definition?
But most of the land that are considered continents are connected to one or kore other land, and thus couldn’t be defined as an island.
Though, after reading a few other comments, it seems the definition of what makes a continent a continent is apparently subject to debate.
~This is why we can’t have nice things.~
I may be mistaken here, but I think the concept of a “continental shelf” is pretty well defined geologically. That is: Outside a land mass, the ocean floor extends a certain distance before dropping off to the deep ocean floor. An island would be a piece of land that sticks out of the sea from this continental shelf, while the “continent” includes the entire shelf, and all the land masses that stick out of the ocean on that shelf.
Of course, this seems to break down a bit for e.g. the Europe/Asia divide (and probably a lot more), but the concept of “continents” vs. “islands” can make sense geologically, although the “continents” are then different from the geopolitical borders ones we usually talk about.
That definition however does some weird things like saying that Tokyo and parts of Siberia are in North America, but Panama and Los Angeles aren’t.
A continent is mostly just a social convention for a bigass geographic and geological structure that is above sea level and largely geologically and culturally separated. North and South America are connected by a land bridge, but that’s really recent in evolutionary time and it’s a real pain in the ass to cross. Europe and Asia are historically separated by the Ural mountains, but it’s hard to look at them in modern day and say “these are two distinct landmasses” especially if you’re saying India isn’t, but historically getting from Europe to what’s worth going to in Asia has involved crossing the Mediterranean much like getting to Africa or sailing around Africa in the early modern period. Australia is a giant landmass with not much else around as is Antarctica.
