World Map With Oceans And Continents – An animated, color-coded map showing the different continents. Depending on the tradition and model, some continents may be consolidated or subdivided.

A continent is any of several large land masses. Continents are usually determined by beliefs rather than strict criteria. Therefore, the number of continents varies. up to sev or only four geographical areas are generally considered continents. Most English-speaking countries recognize seven regions as continents. In order from largest to smallest in area, these seven regions are Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Antarctica, Europe, and Australia.

World Map With Oceans And Continents

Different variants with fewer continents merge some of these regions, examples being the merging of North America and South America into the Americas, Asia and Europe into Eurasia, and Africa, Asia and Europe into Afro-Eurasia.

World Map With Continents

Oceanic islands are often grouped with a nearby continent to divide the entire landmass of the world into geographic regions. Under this plan, most of the Pacific island nations and territories are grouped together with the continent of Australia to form the geographic region of Oceania.

In geology, a continent is defined as “one of the major land masses, including both land and continental shelf”.

Geological continents correspond to six large areas of continental crust that lie on tectonic plates, but exclude small continental fragments such as Madagascar, commonly called microcontinents. Only the Earth’s continental crust is known to exist.

The idea of ​​continental drift became accepted in the 20th century. He hypothesized that today’s continents were formed by the breakup of the supercontinent Pangaea, which formed hundreds of millions of years ago.

World Continents And Oceans

By convention, continents “are understood as large, continuous, discrete land masses, ideally separated by bodies of water.”

In modern systems with five or more continents recognized, at least one pair of continents is connected to land in some way. The criterion “large” leads to an arbitrary classification: Greenland, with an area of ​​2,166,086 square kilometers (836,330 sq mi), is considered only the largest island in the world, while Australia, with 7,617,930 square kilometers (2,941,300 sq mi miles). ), is considered the smallest continent.

All major land masses have coastlines on a single, continuous World Ocean, which is divided into a number of major ocean components according to continents and various geographic criteria.

An area of ​​land or continent, such that the coastline and all land boundaries form the edge of the continent. In this sense, the term continental Europe (sometimes referred to in Britain as “the continent”) is used to refer to mainland Europe, excluding islands such as Great Britain, Iceland, Ireland and Malta, while the term continental Australia can refer to mainland Australia, excluding New Guinea, Tasmania and other nearby islands. Similarly, the continental United States refers to the “49 states (including Alaska but excluding Hawaii) located on the North American continent and the District of Columbia.”

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In terms of geology or physical geography, a continent may extend beyond the boundaries of continuous land to include the shallow, submerged adjacent area (the continental shelf)

In this respect, the edge of the continental shelf is the true edge of the continent, as the coastline varies with changes in sea level.

In this sense, the islands of Great Britain and Ireland are part of Europe, while Australia and the island of New Guinea together form a continent.

As a cultural construct, the concept of continent can be extended beyond the continental shelf to include oceanic islands and continental fragments. Iceland is therefore considered part of Europe and Madagascar part of Africa. Taking the concept to its extreme, some geographers group mainland Australia with other Pacific islands into a single “quasi-continent” called Oceania. This divides the earth’s surface into continents or quasi-continents.

World Continents And Oceans Activity

The criterion that each continent is a separate land mass is usually relaxed due to historical traditions and practical usage. Of the seven most universally recognized continents, only Antarctica and Australia are completely separated from the rest of the continents by ocean. Many continents are defined not as completely separate bodies, but as “more or less distinct land masses”.

Africa and Asia are connected by the Isthmus of Suez, and North America and South America by the Isthmus of Panama. In both cases, there is no complete separation of these land masses from the water (ignoring the Suez Canal and the Panama Canal, which are narrow and shallow as well as man-made). Both isthmuses are very narrow compared to most of the land masses they join.

North America and South America are treated as separate continents in the sev-contint model. However, they can also be considered as a continent known as the Americas. This view was common in the United States until World War II and remains prevalent in some Asian models on six continents.

The model of a single American continent remains a common view in France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Malta, Portugal, Spain and Latin American countries.

World Map Continents Oceans Edible Cake Topper Image Abpid11371

The discrete land mass criterion is completely ignored if the continuous land mass of Eurasia is classified as two separate continents (Asia and Europe). Physically geographically, Europe and the Indian subcontinent are large peninsulas on the Eurasian landmass. However, Europe is considered a continent with its relatively large land area of ​​10,180,000 square kilometers (3,930,000 sq mi), while the Indian subcontinent, with less than half that area, is considered a subcontinent. The alternative view – in geology and geography – that Eurasia is one continent leads to a six-continent worldview. Some see the division of Eurasia into Asia and Europe as a remnant of Eurocism: “In physical, cultural and historical diversity, China and India are comparable to the entire European continent, not to a single European country. […]”

However, for historical and cultural reasons, the view of Europe as a separate continent persists in almost all categorizations.

If continents are strictly defined as separate land masses comprising all the contiguous land of one body, Africa, Asia, and Europe form a continent which may be called Afro-Eurasia.

Combined with the unification of the Americas, this would create a four-continent model consisting of Afro-Eurasia, the Americas, Antarctica, and Australia.

Continents And Oceans Nomenclature

When sea levels were lower during the Pleistocene Ice Age, larger areas of the continental shelf were exposed as land, forming land bridges between Tasmania and mainland Australia.

At that time, Australia and New Guinea were a single continuous continent known as Sahul. Likewise, Afro-Eurasia and the Americas were joined by the Bering Land Bridge. Other islands, such as Great Britain, were annexed to the continents of their continents. At that time there were only three distinct landmasses in the world: Africa-Eurasia-America, Antarctica, and Australia-New Guinea (Sahul).

Some geographers use the term Oceania for a geographic area that includes most of the island nations and territories in the Pacific Ocean, as well as the continent of Australia.

For a more detailed list of population by continental regions and subregions, see List of continents and continental subregions by population.

Continents And Oceans

The table below gives the areas given by the cyclopædia Britannica for each continent according to the seven-continent model, including Australia along with Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia as part of Oceania. It also provides continent populations as estimated for 2021 by the United Nations Statistics Division based on the United Nations Geosystem, which includes all of Russia (ie including Siberia) as part of Europe, but also all of Azerbaijan, Cyprus, Georgia, Kazakhstan and Turkey (ie including Eastern Thrace) as part of Asia.

In addition to today’s continents, the scope and meaning of the term continent includes past geological ones. Supercontinents, largely evidenced earlier in the geologic record, are land masses that make up most of the world’s cratons or continental cores.

These include Vaalbara, Courland, Columbia, Rodinia, Pannotia and Pangea. Over time, these supercontinents broke up into large land masses that formed the first continents.

Some parts of the continents are recognized as subcontinents, particularly the large peninsular islands that are separated from the main landmass due to geographic features. The most widely recognized example is the Indian subcontinent.

World Continents And Oceans — Mobile Montessori

The Arabian Peninsula, the Southern Cone of South America, and Alaska in North America can be considered additional examples.

In many of these cases, the “subcontinents” in question are located on different tectonic plates from the rest of the continent, giving the terminology a geological rationale.

Greenland, generally considered the world’s largest island on the northeastern edge of the North American plate, is sometimes called a subcontinent.

This is a significant departure from the more conventional view of the subcontinent as consisting of a very large spike at the periphery of a continent.

Continents, Islands And Penisulas

When America is considered as one continent (America), it is divided into two subcontinents (North America and South America)

Some areas of the continental crust are largely covered by ocean and can be considered submerged continents. Notable examples are Zealandia, which emerges from the ocean mainly in New Zealand and New Caledonia,

Some islands are located on parts of the continental crust that have detached and moved away from the main continental landmass. Although they are not considered continents due to their relatively small size, they can be considered microcontinents. Madagascar, the largest example, is usually considered an island in Africa, but its different evolution has made it so

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