Facts about Continent

Beyond the Mediterranean Sea, locations all over the world have been cited as the location for Atlantis.

The word continent was used in translating Greek and Latin writings about the three "parts" of the world, although in the original languages no word of exactly the same meaning as continent was used.

Some geologists restrict the term "continent" to portions of the crust built around a stable Precambrian "shield," typically 1.5 to 3.8 billion years old, called a craton.

The seventeenth century is considered Amsterdam's "Golden Age."

The ideal criterion that each continent be a discrete landmass is commonly disregarded in favor of more arbitrary, historical conventions.

Emanuel Bowen, in his 1752 atlas, defined a continent as "a large space of dry land comprehending many countries all joined together, without any separation by water.

The narrowest meaning of continent is that of a continuous area of land or mainland, with the coastline and any land boundaries forming the edge of the continent.

The craton itself is an accretionary complex of ancient mobile belts (mountain belts) from earlier cycles of subduction, continental collision, and break-up from plate tectonic activity.

A continental boundary does not have to be a body of water.

By the late-eighteenth century, some geographers considered it a continent in its own right, making it the sixth (or fifth for those still taking America as a single continent).

In 1727, Handel was commissioned to write four anthems for the coronation ceremony of George II of Great Britain.

From this perspective the edge of the continental shelf is the true edge of the continent, as shorelines vary with changes in sea level.

At this time Australia-New Guinea was a single, continuous continent.

North American continental rocks extend to Greenland (a portion of the Canadian Shield), and in terms of plate boundaries, the North American plate includes the easternmost portion of the Asian land mass.

From the 1950s, most United States geographers divided the American continent in two, consistent with the modern understanding of geology and plate tectonics.

Coastal islands may thus be considered as part of a continent.

When sea levels were lower during the Pleistocene ice age, greater areas of continental shelf were exposed as dry land, forming land bridges.

From the 1500s, the English noun continent was derived from the term continent land, meaning continuous or connected land.

The six-continent combined-Eurasia model is preferred by the geographic community, Russia, Eastern Europe, and Japan.

Today, Europe and most of Asia comprise the unified Eurasian Plate which is approximately coincident with the geographic Eurasian continent excluding India, Arabia, and far eastern Russia.

By this definition, Europe and Asia can be regarded as separate continental masses because they have separate, distinct ancient shield areas and a distinct younger mobile belt (the Ural Mountains) forming the mutual margin.

The current geologic era is relatively anomalous in that so much of the continental areas are "high and dry" compared to much of geologic history.

North and South America are viewed as a single continent—one of six in total—in Iberia, Italy, Israel, some other parts of Europe, and much of Latin America.

An 1849 atlas labeled Antarctica as a continent, but few atlases did so until after World War II.

A continent is one of several large landmasses on Earth.

The term "the Continent" (capitalized)—used predominantly in the European isles, such as the British Isles, Sardinia and Sicily—means mainland Europe, although it can also mean Asia when said in Japan.