Concept in Definition ABC

A continent is a large expanse of land, much wider and more extensive than that of a country, which precisely differs from these smaller portions, due to some specific issues such as geographic, cultural, oceanic and ethnographic.

Although a good part of the scholars of the subject and the books of geography that we study at school, if we meet in Latin AmericaBah at least that is my case and as they taught me, they distinguish six continents among which are America, Africa, Antarctica, Europe, Asia and Oceania, there are other criteria when counting the number of continents that make up planet earth. This division depends more than anything on the vision that is used, for example, if two great masses of land united form one or two continents.

In this regard, the main conflict it lies between, on the one hand, Asia and Europe and, on the other, between North America and South America. Only a few more optimistic minds have suggested that Asia, Europe and Africa are part of a single continent that would be called, by the way, Euraphrasia.

For example, in Western Europe and North America the existence of seven continents is often taught in geography, that is, in this case, North America and South America are understood as two independent parts of each other. Meanwhile, in mostly scientific contexts and in North America, again, it is often spoken of a six-continent model. In this situation, what is contemplated is the union of Europe and Asia as a whole.

However, as we commented at the beginning of our review, the most common division is as follows: Africa: it borders Asia in the Suez Canal in Egypt and Europe through the Strait of Gibraltar and extends southwest to the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa.

For its part, Antarctica that surrounds the entire South Pole, borders America through the Drake Passage, from Oceania across the boundary between the Indian and Pacific Oceans and from Africa through the eastern boundary with the Ocean Atlantic. America, for this division, in addition to being separated from Asia by the Northwest by the Bering Strait, is subdivided into two subcontinents, North America and South America. Oceania is located in Southeast Asia between the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Thus it extends over the eastern half of the northern hemisphere, from the Arctic Ocean to the Indian Ocean and from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean and finally Europe, also in the eastern half of the northern hemisphere, hence the controversies, from the Arctic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea, reaching in the west to the Atlantic Ocean and east to Asia.

But of course, all this provision As I was saying, we find it today, since many years ago, tens of millions of years, more precisely, there was only one continent, which It was called Pangea, while and according to a theory, the tectonic plates that made it up gradually separated until they reached the conformation current.