There have been attempts at defining physical boundaries following the Ural mountain watershed as the separating physical feature between the two continents, but the path followed by the Ural River that flows into the Caspian sea has been unclear for demarcation. Attempts at using the Caspian sea as a demarcation have also been inconclusive due to the ambiguity regarding Georgia since it could be interpreted as being part of either continent.
Cyprus is another country whose location is a subject of interpretation on whether it is part of Europe or Asia. Southeast Asia, on the other hand, depends on the annual monsoons, which bring rain and make agriculture possible. Asia is the most mountainous of all the continents. More than 50 of the highest peaks in the world are in Asia. Mount Everest, which reaches more than 8, meters 29, feet high in the Himalaya range, is the highest point on Earth.
These mountains have become major destination spots for adventurous travelers. Plate tectonics continuously push the mountains higher. As the landmass of India pushes northward into the landmass of Eurasia, parts of the Himalayas rise at a rate of about 2.
The land there lies more than meters 1, feet below sea level. Although the Eurasian Plate carries most of Asia, it is not the only one supporting major parts of the large continent.
The Indian Plate supports the Indian peninsula, sometimes called the Indian subcontinent. The Australian Plate carries some islands in Indonesia. Australia In addition to being the smallest continent, Australia is the flattest and the second-driest, after Antarctica. The continent is sometimes called Oceania , to include the thousands of tiny islands of the Central Pacific and South Pacific, most notably Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia including the U.
However, the continent of Australia itself includes only the nation of Australia, the eastern portion of the island of New Guinea the nation of Papua New Guinea and the island nation of New Zealand. Australia covers just less than 8. Its population is about 31 million. It is the most sparsely populated continent, after Antarctica. Rainfall is light on the plateau, and not many people have settled there.
The Great Dividing Range, a long mountain range, rises near the east coast and extends from the northern part of the territory of Queensland through the territories of New South Wales and Victoria. Mainland Australia is known for the Outback , a desert area in the interior. This area is so dry, hot, and barren that few people live there. In addition to the hot plateaus and deserts in mainland Australia, the continent also features lush equatorial rainforests on the island of New Guinea, tropical beaches, and high mountain peaks and glaciers in New Zealand.
Biologists who study animals consider Australia a living laboratory. When the continent began to break away from Antarctica more than 60 million years ago, it carried a cargo of animals with it. Isolated from life on other continents, the animals developed into creatures unique to Australia, such as the koala, the platypus, and the Tasmanian devil. The reef itself is 1, kilometers 1, miles of living coral communities. Most of Australia sits on the Australian Plate.
Antarctica Antarctica is the windiest, driest, and iciest place on Earth. Antarctica is larger than Europe or Australia, but unlike those continents, it has no permanent human population.
People who work there are scientific researchers and support staff, such as pilots and cooks. The climate of Antarctica makes it impossible to support agriculture or a permanent civilization.
Temperatures in Antarctica, much lower than Arctic temperatures, plunge lower than degrees Celsius degrees Fahrenheit. Scientific bases and laboratories have been established in Antarctica for studies in fields that include geology , oceanography , and meteorology.
Antarctica is also an ideal place for discovering meteorites, or stony objects that have impacted Earth from space.
The dark meteorites, often made of metals like iron , stand out from the white landscape of most of the continent. Antarctica is almost completely covered with ice, sometimes as thick as 3. Like all other continents, Antarctica has volcanic activity. The most active volcano is Mount Erebus, which is less than 1, kilometers miles from the South Pole. Antarctica does not have any countries.
However, scientific groups from different countries inhabit the research stations. A multinational treaty negotiated in and reviewed in states that research in Antarctica can only be used for peaceful purposes. Vostok Station, where the coldest temperature on Earth was recorded, is operated by Russia.
All of Antarctica sits on the Antarctic Plate. Microcontinents In addition to the seven major continents, Earth is home to microcontinents, or pieces of land that are not geologically identified with a continent.
Major microcontinents include:. Also called cosmic dust or space dust. Gas molecules are in constant, random motion. Also called the Somali Peninsula. The last ice age peaked about 20, years ago. Also called glacial age. Monsoon usually refers to the winds of the Indian Ocean and South Asia, which often bring heavy rains.
Regions are the basic units of geography. Sea level is determined by measurements taken over a year cycle. Also called lithospheric plate. The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit.
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Further Investigations: What is an Invertebrate? Question Set: What is a Mammal? Further Investigations: What is a Mammal?
Share and Connect. We invite you to share your thoughts, ask for help or read what other educators have to say by joining our community. The transition from a threefold to a fourfold continental scheme did not occur immediately after Columbus, however. First, America had to be intellectually "invented" as a distinct parcel of land--one that could be viewed geographically, if not culturally, as equivalent to the other continents.
According to Eviatar Zerubavel, this reconceptualization took nearly a century to evolve, in part because it activated serious "cosmographic shock. The Spanish imperial imagination persisted in denying continental status to its transatlantic colonies for even longer. According to Walter Mignolo, "The Castilian notion of 'the Indies' [remained] in place up to the end of the colonial empire; 'America' [began] to be employed by independentist intellectuals only toward the end of the eighteenth century.
While cartographic conventions of the period rendered the new landmass, like Africa, as distinctly inferior to Asia and Europe, virtually all global geographies by the seventeenth century at least acknowledged the Americas as one of the "four quarters of the world. As this brief account suggests, accepting the existence of a transatlantic landmass required more than simply adding a new piece to the existing continental model.
As Edmundo O'Gorman has brilliantly demonstrated, reckoning with the existence of previously unknown lands required a fundamental restructuring of European cosmography. For in the old conception, Europe, Africa, end Asia had usually been envisioned as forming a single, interconnected "world island," the Orbis Terrarum. The existence of another such "island" in the antipodes of the Southern Hemisphere--an Orbis Alterius--had often been hypothesized, but it was assumed that it would constitute a world apart, inhabited, if at all, by sapient creatures of an entirely different species.
Americans, by contrast, appeared to be of the same order as other humans, suggesting that their homeland must be a fourth part of the human world rather than a true alter-world. Thus it was essentially anthropological data that undermined the established cosmographic order.
In the long run, the discovery of a distant but recognizably human population in the Americas would irrevocably dash the world island to pieces. Over the next several centuries the fundamental relationship between the world's major landmasses was increasingly seen as one of separation, not contiguity. In Ortelius divided the world into four constituent parts, yet his global maps did not emphasize divisional lines, and his regional maps sometimes spanned "continental" divisions.
By the late seventeenth century, however, most global atlases unambiguously distinguished the world's main landmasses and classified all regional maps accordingly.
The Greek notion of a unitary human terrain, in other words, was disassembled into its constituent continents, whose relative isolation was now ironically converted into their defining feature.
Although the possibility of an Orbis Alterius was never again taken seriously, the boundaries dividing the known lands would henceforth be conceived in much more absolute terms than they had been in the past.
Even as the accuracy of mapping improved dramatically in this period, the conceptualization of global divisions was so hardened as to bring about a certain conceptual deterioration. As geographical knowledge increased, and as the authority of the Greeks diminished, the architecture of global geography underwent more subtle transformations as well. If continents were to be meaningful geographical divisions of human geography, rather than mere reflections of an ordained cosmic plan, the Nile and the Don obviously formed inappropriate boundaries.
Similarly, by the sixteenth century, geographers began to realize that Europe and Asia were not separated by a narrow isthmus, that the Don River did not originate anywhere near the Arctic Sea, and that the Sea of Azov was smaller than had previously been imagined. While the old view was remarkably persistent, a new boundary for these two continents was eventually required as well.
The difficulty was that no convenient barrier like the Red Sea presented itself between Europe and Asia. The initial response was to specify precise linkages between south- and north-flowing rivers across the Russian plains; by the late seventeenth century, one strategy was to divide Europe from Asia along stretches of the Don, Volga, Kama, and Ob Rivers.
This was considered an unsolved geographical issue, however, and geographers vied with each other to locate the most fitting divisional line. Only in the eighteenth century did a Swedish military officer, Philipp-Johann von Strahlenberg, argue that the Ural Mountains formed the most significant barrier. Von Strahlenberg's proposal was enthusiastically seconded by Russian intellectuals associated with Peter the Great's Westernization program, particularly Vasilii Nikitich Tatishchev, in large part because of its ideological convenience.
In highlighting the Ural divide, Russian Westernizers could at once emphasize the European nature of the historical Russian core while consigning Siberia to the position of an alien Asian realm suitable for colonial rule and exploitation. Indeed, many Russian texts at this time dropped the name Siberia in favor of the more Asiatic-sounding Great Tartary.
Controversy continued in Russian and German geographical circles, however, with some scholars attempting to push the boundary further east to the Ob or even the Yenisey River, while others argued for holding the line at the Don. Tatishchev's and von Strahlenberg's position was eventually to triumph not only in Russia but throughout Europe.
After the noted French geographer M. Malte-Brun gave it his seal of approval in the nineteenth century, the Ural boundary gained near-universal acceptance. Yet this move necessitated a series of further adjustments, since the Ural Mountains do not extend far enough south--or west--to form a complete border. In atlases of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the old and new divisions were often combined, with Europe shown as separated from Asia by the Don River, a stretch of the Volga River, and the Ural Mountains.
From the mids on the most common, although by no means universal, solution to this problem was to separate Asia from Europe by a complex line running southward through the Urals, jumping in their southern extent to the Ural River, extending through some two-thirds the length of the Caspian Sea, and turning in a sharp angle to run northwestward along the crest of the Caucasus Mountains. Indeed, as recently as , the United States Department of State gave its official imprimatur to this division.
The old usage of the Don River, arbitrary though it might have been, at least required a less contorted delineation. Moreover, the new division did even more injustice to cultural geography than did the old, for it included within Europe such obviously "non-European" peoples as the Buddhist, Mongolian-speaking Kalmyks. While this geographical boundary between Europe and Asia is now seldom questioned and is often assumed to be either wholly natural or too trivial to worry about, the issue still provokes occasional interest.
In , for example, a group of Russian geographers argued that the true divide should follow "the eastern slope of the Urals and their prolongation the Mugodzhar hills, the Emba River, the northern shore of the Caspian Sea, the Kumo-manychskaya Vpadina depression and the Kerchenski Strait to the Black Sea"--thus placing the Urals firmly within Europe and the Caucasus within Asia. Other writers have elected to ignore formal guidelines altogether, placing the boundary between the two "continents" wherever they see fit.
The edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, for example, defines the Swat district of northern Pakistan as "a region bordering on Europe and Asia"--"Europe" perhaps connoting, in this context, all areas traversed by Alexander the Great.
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