How many continents are there?

is there any other than cultural reason to devide Europa and Asia? - I wouldn't advice to bring in culture into geology

you culd argue about S and N America, though, but where would you put CA? devide it into half? I think that would be stupid - and in which place/? the chanel was dug only a couple of decades ago.
I think that N and S and C America is 1 continent

 

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you missed an option, there's just 1.

1 big ass continent, it's just that most of it is under water at the moment.

EDIT: oops, I just noticed someone already said that.

 

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yeah it doesn't matter how many continents there are, the important thing is that we are all living on one big planet called Earth, which we all love

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1:North/South Amefrica
2:Eurosiartic
2 for me

 

Of course it doesn't matter how many continents there are. But I thought it was interesting that other countries teach numbers other than seven. I had always thought it was pretty much universal. I see that seven is ahead in the poll by a large margin, only one vote for six so far. But, I think the poll is faulty if there is that large a dichotomy in the number. I should have made a poll with 1 to 10. I see there are almost 500 views of this thread and about 20 votes.

ChildOfTheMind,

So where does Australia fall? Be careful, the owner of this site is Australian.

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Nice graphic, Spuriousmonkey. I'd agree with Avatar, except for compressing Europe and Asia into one (Eurasia) and adding 2 more "halfs" - New Zealand, which is a fragment of Gondwana isolated at least as long as Australia, and East Africa, which is in the process of breaking away along the Great Rift Valley. In 20 million years or so, there'll be a big island some way south of India.

 

What about Baja? It'll be off by itself in 20 million years too. And the smog polluted city of LA will be no more.

 

More likely that the Cocos Plate will be subducted under North America, and Baja fuse with the main continent as a terran.

 

Hmm, my understanding is that it's sliding south and west. It's not an area that I spend a lot of time researching though.

Which direction is the arabian plate moving? Is it moving inland or out to sea?

 

I think people are getting the word continent confused with the word island.
There are 7 continents. Some are joined, it don't think it matters, nothing in the continent rulebook says continents can't be joined. Islands are landmasses surrounded by water. Continents are just masses of land humans named continents.

 

True, Doc - there is no well-defined size threshold at which an island becomes a continent. Greenland is considered an island, Australia a continent; but both are landmasses surrounded by water.

The best way of defining a continent might be whether or not that particular landmass is the MAIN landmass on a distinct tectonic plate - unless it's ridiculously small (like Hawaii), or already in contact with a much larger landmass on a neighbouring plate(like Baja). Australia is therefore a continent, but not Arabia.

By this definition, Europe & Asia constiture a single continent: they would have been separate in the distant past, but the joint between their respective plates has long since sealed and become rigid, as marked by the Ural Mountains. India is still in the process of fusing with Asia, and the Himalayas still growing.

 

I thought it was seven, along with the seven seas and anything else significant about seven.

 

7 Seas of Rhye, 7 days of the week, 7 seals in Revelations, 7 Samurai, 7 rivers in Bangladesh... got any more?

 

Book of the seven seals?
Chaos uh yeah chaos rules tralalalala!

 

If there is truly 5 continents, why is part of Russia considered Europe, and the other part Asia? And if Europe and Asia are on the same plate, where did the Ural Mountain range come from?

 

When there are only 5 continents they are:

America
Eurasia
Africa
Australia
Antarctica

 

Oops forgotten:

That means that Russia is on only one continent.

It´s their fault for being so damn big!

 

What? Why would you devide a country down the middle just because it was too big?

 

Just as information, tectonic plates do not define the boundaries of continents.

And how should I know why they had to divide Russia?
I think Europa and Asia are one continent anyway.
Sorry but with that problem I cannot help you,
the size may be a possibility but as it seems, people first
have to come to a conclusion how many continents there are.

 

Well, then maybe we have to establish what defines a continent, the rest is just calculation.

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\Con"ti*nent\, n.

One of the grand divisions of land on the globe; the main land; specifically (Phys. Geog.), a large body of land differing from an island, not merely in its size, but in its structure, which is that of a large basin bordered by mountain chains; as, the continent of North America.

Note: The continents are now usually regarded as six in number: North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia. But other large bodies of land are also reffered to as continents; as, the Antarctic continent; the continent of Greenland. Europe, Asia, and Africa are often grouped together as the Eastern Continent, and North and South America as the Western Continent.

Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.

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Looks to me like the Ural Mountains devide two land basins, that of Asia and that of Europe, thereby defining them as seperate continents.