It depends. It depends on whether you choose the historical and cultural perspective or the scientific perspective. And in both cases, there is a great deal of inconsistency.
Thanks for the footnote about the ice. This is consistent with my contention that this planet is still in an ice age, because there is still enough ice to sink continents. And not only Antarctica would rise – Greenland too (and for all I know might connect itself to the rest of North America.
Brilliant breakdown of how arbitrary these boundaries really are. The tectonic plate map is where this totally clicked forme, seeing how the North American plate extends into Siberia while losing Central America makes the whole cultural model feel like a convenient fiction we agreed on. Growing up I learned the seven-continent model, then moved somwhere teaching six, the cognitive dissonance was wild until realizing both were equally "correct" depending on context.
Cultural and historical context is almost everything to understand the discrepancies :). If Europe hadn't been so historically relevant for the West, it would have never been considered a separated continent by anyone.
I think it would be relatively straightforward to just think of “continent” as including 1) a main landmass, 2) maybe subcontinents, and 3) nearby/outlying islands. So Eurasia would include Europe and India as subcontinents, and Australia would expand to mean the same thing as “Oceania.” And Greenland is sufficiently smaller than Australia that the island/continent cutoff point makes enough sense as-is.
It really depends on the rules you want to go for. Are we separating Africa from Eurasia (and North and South America) just because they have a man-made canal in-between? Bundling them as part of the same continent (or not), is an arbitrary decision. Which can be fine, but arbitrary nevertheless.
I'd say it's pretty clear that Africa, North America, and South America represent their own landmasses (much more than Europe), even without the canals :-) Those two isthmuses are pretty tiny.
Incidentally I don't think it makes much sense to consider the Panama Canal the division between the Americas - the whole Isthmus of Panama is pretty clearly North America. (And actually there's a tiny bit of Colombia on that isthmus too, so I'd call Colombia trans-continental before Panama :)
So, I'd claim that I'm not being arbitrary at all...but you could argue that claim itself is arbitrary, haha.
Thanks for the footnote about the ice. This is consistent with my contention that this planet is still in an ice age, because there is still enough ice to sink continents. And not only Antarctica would rise – Greenland too (and for all I know might connect itself to the rest of North America.
Brilliant breakdown of how arbitrary these boundaries really are. The tectonic plate map is where this totally clicked forme, seeing how the North American plate extends into Siberia while losing Central America makes the whole cultural model feel like a convenient fiction we agreed on. Growing up I learned the seven-continent model, then moved somwhere teaching six, the cognitive dissonance was wild until realizing both were equally "correct" depending on context.
Cultural and historical context is almost everything to understand the discrepancies :). If Europe hadn't been so historically relevant for the West, it would have never been considered a separated continent by anyone.
I think it would be relatively straightforward to just think of “continent” as including 1) a main landmass, 2) maybe subcontinents, and 3) nearby/outlying islands. So Eurasia would include Europe and India as subcontinents, and Australia would expand to mean the same thing as “Oceania.” And Greenland is sufficiently smaller than Australia that the island/continent cutoff point makes enough sense as-is.
It really depends on the rules you want to go for. Are we separating Africa from Eurasia (and North and South America) just because they have a man-made canal in-between? Bundling them as part of the same continent (or not), is an arbitrary decision. Which can be fine, but arbitrary nevertheless.
I'd say it's pretty clear that Africa, North America, and South America represent their own landmasses (much more than Europe), even without the canals :-) Those two isthmuses are pretty tiny.
Incidentally I don't think it makes much sense to consider the Panama Canal the division between the Americas - the whole Isthmus of Panama is pretty clearly North America. (And actually there's a tiny bit of Colombia on that isthmus too, so I'd call Colombia trans-continental before Panama :)
So, I'd claim that I'm not being arbitrary at all...but you could argue that claim itself is arbitrary, haha.