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Top Questions
What is a continent?
What is a continent?
A continent is a large continuous mass of land conventionally regarded as a collective region. There are seven continents: Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Antarctica, Europe, and Australia (listed from largest to smallest in size). Sometimes Europe and Asia are considered one continent called Eurasia. Continents loosely correlate with the positions of tectonic plates.
What is the largest continent?
What is the largest continent?
Asia is the largest continent on Earth by size. It is approximately 44,614,000 square kilometres (17,226,200 square miles).
Do continents move?
Do continents move?
Geologists theorize that continents move. This theory is called plate tectonics, which holds that the lithosphere, the outermost layer of Earth (where continents are), lies on top of a semifluid layer of partially molten magma called the asthenosphere. Convection from the decay of radioactive elements in the mantle causes continental and oceanic plates to move.
What is the Pangea supercontinent?
What is the Pangea supercontinent?
Pangea is a landmass of the Early Permian to Early Jurassic Periods that incorporated almost all modern landmasses and is thus considered a supercontinent. Overwhelming evidence for Pangea includes similar fossil and geological records across different continents and the matching “jigsaw” shapes of today’s continents, most notably the eastern South American and western African coastlines.
continent, one of the larger continuous masses of land, namely, Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Antarctica, Europe, and Australia, listed in order of size. (Europe and Asia are sometimes considered a single continent, Eurasia.)
There is great variation in the sizes of continents; Asia is more than five times as large as Australia. The largest island in the world, Greenland, is only about one-fourth the size of Australia. The continents differ sharply in their degree of compactness. Africa has the most regular coastline and, consequently, the lowest ratio of coastline to total area. Europe is the most irregular and indented and has by far the highest ratio of coastline to total area.
Britannica QuizQuick Quiz: This Land Is Your LandThe continents are not distributed evenly over the surface of the globe. If a hemisphere map centred in northwestern Europe is drawn, most of the world’s land area can be seen to lie within that hemisphere. More than two-thirds of the Earth’s land surface lies north of the Equator, and all the continents except Antarctica are wedge shaped, wider in the north than they are in the south.
The distribution of the continental platforms and ocean basins on the surface of the globe and the distribution of the major landform features have long been among the most intriguing problems for scientific investigation and theorizing. Among the many hypotheses that have been offered as explanation are: (1) the tetrahedral (four-faced) theory, in which a cooling earth assumes the shape of a tetrahedron by spherical collapse; (2) the accretion theory, in which younger rocks attached to older shield areas became buckled to form the landforms; (3) the continental-drift theory, in which an ancient floating continent drifted apart; and (4) the convection-current theory, in which convection currents in the Earth’s interior dragged the crust to cause folding and mountain making.
Geological and seismological evidence accumulated in the 20th century indicates that the continental platforms do “float” on a crust of heavier material that forms a layer completely enveloping the Earth. Each continent has one of the so-called shield areas that formed 2 billion to 4 billion years ago and is the core of the continent to which the remainder (most of the continent) has been added. Even the rocks of the extremely old shield areas are older in the centre and younger toward the margins, indicating that this process of accumulation started early. In North America the whole northeast quarter of the continent, called the Canadian, or Laurentian, Shield, is characterized by the ancient rocks of what might be called the original continent. In Europe the shield area underlies the eastern Scandinavian peninsula and Finland. The Guiana Highlands of South America are the core of that continent. Much of eastern Siberia is underlain by the ancient rocks, as are western Australia and southern Africa. See also continental drift.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaThis article was most recently revised and updated by Adam Augustyn.
