Started an argument with my much smarter wife because she said North and South America are not two separate continents. She was right, because continents are only defined by convention.
Regardless of which definition you go with, someone saying North and South America are one continent but Europe and Asia are two separate continents are at the very least being inconsistent
There isn’t really a natural barrier between North and South America, though. Asia has the Urals.
Shall we make California its own continent because of the Rockies?
They’d have to post a sign at the border warning that continents and mountains may cause cancer…
Okay, that was actually pretty funny
You know what? You actually do have a point.
North and South America have the Darién Mountains/Darién Gap
The Urals don’t even stretch all the way across the continental boundary
Again: inconsistent.
Hmmm… You’re right. It does feel a lot more arbitrary when you put it that way.
There also isn’t a strict definition of when a pond becomes a lake
Huh. In my language the difference is that a pond is artificial (generally for farming fish), but apparently that’s a fishpond in English and pond can be natural. TIL.
Yes, I personally love 4 continents. Americas, Afro-Eurasia, Oceania, Antarctica
If you’re gonna group them like that, there’s no Americas, it’s America.
There is a useful way to do it: By looking at Tectonic Plates and their boundaries.
According to the image on Wikipedia depicting the plates, there would then be 17 continents, although some of those 17 would be entirely ocean, or only small islands
Half of Japan would be North American? I didn’t expect that.
They do like to play baseball.
I’m really surprised this is the first time I’ve seen Africa as two continents. The Great Rift Valley is well known but I just hadn’t heard going the next logical step
These are not continents. The image is more of an illustration of why tectonic plates are not a good way to redefine continents not be arbitrary.
