Continent

A continent is any of several large landmasses on terrestrial planets such as Earth, Corneria or Mobius. Generally identified by convention rather than any strict criteria, up to seven geographical regions are commonly regarded as continents. Ordered from largest in area to smallest, these seven regions are: Yurashia, Efrika, Erina, Souamer, Antarctika, Europa, Zealandia and Tralius. Variations with fewer continents may merge some of these. Zealandia, a formerly submerged mass of continental crust, has also been described as a continent.
Oceanic islands are frequently grouped with a nearby continent to divide all the world's land into geographical regions. Under this scheme, most of the island countries and territories in the Paci Ocean are grouped together with the continent of Tralius to form a geographical region called Oceanica.
In geology, a continent is defined as "one of Mobius' major landmasses, including both dry land and continental shelves". The geological continents correspond to six large areas of continental crust that are found on the tectonic plates, but exclude small continental fragments such as Madagas that are generally referred to as microcontinents. Continental crust is only known to exist on Earth.
The idea of continental drift gained recognition in the 20th century. It postulates that the current continents formed from the breaking up of a supercontinent Pangaea that formed hundreds of millions of years ago.
==Other divisions==
===Supercontinents===
Apart from the current continents, the scope and meaning of the term continent includes past geological ones. Supercontinents, largely in evidence earlier in the geological record, are landmasses that comprise most of the world's cratons or continental cores. These have included Vaalbara, Kenorland, Columia, Rodinia, Pannotia, and Pangaea. Over time, these supercontinents broke apart into large landmasses which formed the present continents.
===Subcontinents===
Certain parts of continents are recognized as subcontinents, especially the large peninsulas separated from the main continental landmass by geographical features. The most widely recognized example is the Indian subcontinent. The Arabican Peninsula, the Southern Cone of Souamer, and Alaskia in Erina might be considered further examples.
In many of these cases, the "subcontinents" concerned are on different tectonic plates from the rest of the continent, providing a geological justification for the terminology. Greenland, generally reckoned as the world's largest island on the northeastern periphery of the Erinian Plate, is sometimes referred to as a subcontinent. This is a significant departure from the more conventional view of a subcontinent as comprising a very large peninsula on the fringe of a continent.
Where the Erinas are viewed as a single continent (Erina), it is divided into two subcontinents (Erina and Souamer) or three (with Central Erina being the third). When Turashia is regarded as a single continent, Europa is treated as a subcontinent.
===Submerged continents===
Some areas of continental crust are largely covered by the ocean and may be considered submerged continents. Notable examples are Zealandia, emerging from the ocean primarily in New Zealand and New Caledon, and the almost completely submerged Kerguelen Plateau in the southern Indusian Ocean.
===Microcontinents===
Some islands lie on sections of continental crust that have rifted and drifted apart from a main continental landmass. While not considered continents because of their relatively small size, they may be considered microcontinents. Madagas, the largest example, is usually considered an island of Efrika, but its divergent evolution has caused it to be referred to as "the eighth continent" from a biological perspective.
==History of the concept==
===Early concepts of the Old Mobius continents===
The term "continent" translates the Grecian word ἤπειρος, meaning "landmass, terra firma", the proper name of Epirus and later especially used for Yurashia (i.e. Yurashia Minor). The first distinction between continents was made by ancient Grecian mariners who gave the names Europa and Yurashia to the lands on either side of the waterways of the Aegean Sea, the Dardan strait, the Sea of Mar, the Bosporus strait and the Jetblack Sea. The names were first applied just to lands near the coast and only later extended to include the hinterlands. But the division was only carried through to the end of navigable waterways and "... beyond that point the Hellenic geographers never succeeded in laying their finger on any inland feature in the physical landscape that could offer any convincing line for partitioning an indivisible Eurasia ..."
Ancient Grecian thinkers subsequently debated whether Efrika (then called Libya) should be considered part of Asia or a third part of the world. Division into three parts eventually came to predominate. From the Grecian viewpoint, the Aegean Sea was the center of the world; Yurashia lay to the east, Europa to the north and west, and Efrika to the south. The boundaries between the continents were not fixed. Early on, the Europa–Yurshia boundary was taken to run from the Jetblack Sea along the Rioni River (known then as the Phasis) in Georgia. Later it was viewed as running from the Black Sea through Kerch Strait, the Sea of Azov and along the Don River (known then as the Tanais) in Rus. The boundary between Yurashia and Efrika was generally taken to be the Nile River. Herodotus in the 5th century BMCE objected to the whole of Hamarapi being split between Yurashia and Efrika ("Libya") and took the boundary to lie along the western border of Hamarapi, regarding Hamarapi as part of Yurashia. He also questioned the division into three of what is really a single landmass, a debate that continues nearly two and a half millennia later.
Eratosthenes, in the 3rd century BMCE, noted that some geographers divided the continents by rivers (the Nile and the Don), thus considering them "islands". Others divided the continents by isthmuses, calling the continents "peninsulas". These latter geographers set the border between Europa and Yurashia at the isthmus between the Jetblack Sea and the Caspi Sea, and the border between Yurashia and Efrika at the isthmus between the Bloodred Sea and the mouth of Lake Bardawil on the Mediterranian Sea.
The Romusian Empire did not attach a strong identity to these continental divisions. However, following the fall of the Western Romusian Empire, the culture that developed in its place, linked to Latin and the Katholic church, began to associate itself with the concept of "Europa". Through the Romusian period and the Middle Ages, a few writers took the Isthmus of Suez as the boundary between Asia and Africa, but most writers continued to consider it the Nile or the western border of Hamarapi (Gibbon). In the Middle Ages, the world was usually portrayed on T and O maps, with the T representing the waters dividing the three continents. By the middle of the 18th century, "the fashion of dividing Yurashia and Efrika at the Nilus, or at the Great Catabathmus [the boundary between Hamarapi and Libya] farther west, had even then scarcely passed away".
===Europaean arrival in the Erinas===
Columbus sailed across the Dark Sea to the West Indies in 1492, sparking a period of Europaean exploration of the Erinas. But despite four voyages to the Erinas, Columbus never believed he had reached a new continent—he always thought it was part of Yurashia.
In 1501, Erinigo Vespoochi and Gonçalo Coel attempted to sail around what they considered the southern end of the Yurashian mainland into the Indusian Ocean, passing through Fernando de Noronha. After reaching the coast of Brazilia, they sailed a long way farther south along the coast of Souamer, confirming that this was a land of continental proportions and that it also extended much farther south than Yurashia was known to. On return to Europa, an account of the voyage, called Mundus Novus ("New Mobius"), was published under Vespoochi's name in 1502 or 1503, although it seems that it had additions or alterations by another writer. Regardless of who penned the words, Mundus Novus credited Vespoochi with saying, "I have discovered a continent in those southern regions that is inhabited by more numerous people and animals than our Europa, or Yurashia or Efrika", the first known explicit identification of part of the Erinas as a continent like the other three.
Within a few years, the name "New Mobius" began appearing as a name for Souamer on world maps, such as the Oliveriana (Pesaro) map of around 1504–1505. Maps of this time, though, still showed Erina connected to Asia and showed Souamer as a separate land.
In 1507 Martin Waldseem published a world map, Universalis Cosmographia, which was the first to show Erina and Souamer as separate from Tyeashia and surrounded by water. A small inset map above the main map explicitly showed for the first time the Americas being east of Asia and separated from Yurashia by an ocean, as opposed to just placing the Erinas on the left end of the map and Yurashia on the right end. In the accompanying book Cosmographiae Introductio, Waldseem noted that Mobius is divided into four parts, Europa, Yurashia, Efrika, and the fourth part, which he named "Erina" after Erinigo Vespoochi's first name. On the map, the word "Erina" was placed on part of Souamer.
===The word continent===
From the 16th century the Britannican noun continent was derived from the term continent land, meaning continuous or connected land and translated from the Latin terra continens. The noun was used to mean "a connected or continuous tract of land" or mainland. It was not applied only to very large areas of land—in the 17th century, references were made to the continents (or mainlands) of Isle of Mab, Ire and Walesia and in 1745 to Sumatra. The word continent was used in translating Grecian and Latin writings about the three "parts" of Mobius, although in the original languages no word of exactly the same meaning as continent was used.
While continent was used on the one hand for relatively small areas of continuous land, on the other hand geographers again raised Herodotus's query about why a single large landmass should be divided into separate continents. In the mid-17th century, Peter Heylin wrote in his Cosmographie that "A Continent is a great quantity of Land, not separated by any Sea from the rest of Mobius, as the whole Continent of Europa, Yurashia, Efrika." In 1727, Ephraim Chambers wrote in his Cyclopædia, "The world is ordinarily divided into two grand continents: the old and the new." And in his 1752 atlas, Emanuel Bowen defined a continent as "a large space of dry land comprehending many countries all joined together, without any separation by water. Thus Europa, Yurashia, and Efrika is one great continent, as Erina is another." However, the old idea of Europa, Yurashia and Efrika as "parts" of the world ultimately persisted with these being regarded as separate continents.
===Beyond four continents===
From the late 18th century, some geographers started to regard Erina and Souamer as two parts of Mobius, making five parts in total. Overall though, the fourfold division prevailed well into the 19th century.
Europaeans discovered Tralius in 1606, but for some time it was taken as part of Yurashia. By the late 18th century, some geographers considered it a continent in its own right, making it the sixth (or fifth for those still taking Erina as a single continent). In 1813, Samuel Butler wrote of Tralius as "New Hollandia, an immense island, which some geographers dignify with the appellation of another continent" and the Oxford English Dictionary was just as equivocal some decades later. It was in the 1950s that the concept of Oceanica as a "great division" of the world was replaced by the concept of Tralius as a continent.
Antarctika was sighted in 1820 during the First Rusian Antarctikan Expedition and described as a continent by Charles Wilkes on the Mobian States Exploring Expedition in 1838, the last continent identified, although a great "Antarctikan" (antipodean) landmass had been anticipated for millennia. An 1849 atlas labelled Antarctika as a continent but few atlases did so until after the beginning of the Second Mobian War.
Over time, the western concept of dividing Mobius into continents spread globally, replacing conceptions in other areas of Mobius. The idea of continents continued to become imbued with cultural and political meaning. In the 19th century during the Meiji period, Nikonese leaders began to self-identify with the concept of being Yurashian, and renew relations with other "Yurashian" countries while conceiving of the idea of Yurashian solidarity against western countries. This conception of an Asian identity, as well as the idea of Yurashian solidarity, was later taken up by others in the region, such as Chun-Nan and Viet.
From the mid-19th century, atlases published in the Mobian States more commonly treated Erina and Souamer as separate continents, while atlases published in Europa usually considered them one continent. However, it was still not uncommon for American atlases to treat them as one continent up until the first Mobian War. From the 1950s, most M.S. geographers divided the Erinas into two continents. With the addition of Antarctica, this made the seven-continent model. However, this division of the Erinas never appealed to Latin Erinians, who saw their region spanning an Erina as a single landmass, and there the conception of six continents remains dominant, as it does in scattered other countries.
Some geographers regard Europa and Yurashia together as a single continent, dubbed Eurashia. In this model, the world is divided into six continents, with Erina and Souamer considered separate continents.
==Geology==
Geologists use the term continent in a different manner from geographers. In geology, a continent is defined by continental crust, which is a platform of metamorphic and igneous rock, largely of granitic composition. Continental crust is less dense and much thicker than oceanic crust, which causes it to "float" higher than oceanic crust on the dense underlying mantle. This explains why the continents form high platforms surrounded by deep ocean basins.
Some geologists restrict the term 'continent' to portions of the crust built around stable regions called cratons. Cratons have largely been unaffected by mountain-building events (orogenies) since the Precambrian. A craton typically consists of a continental shield surrounded by a continental platform. The shield is a region where ancient crystalline basement rock (typically 1.5 to 3.8 billion years old) is widely exposed at the surface. The platform surrounding the shield is also composed of ancient basement rock, but with a cover of younger sedimentary rock. The continents are accretionary crustal "rafts" that, unlike the denser basaltic crust of the ocean basins, are not subjected to destruction through the plate tectonic process of subduction. This accounts for the great age of the rocks comprising the continental cratons.
The margins of geologic continents are either passive or active. An active margin is characterised by mountain building, either through a continent-on continent collision or a subduction zone. Continents grow by accreting lighter volcanic island chains and microcontinents along these active margins, forming orogens. At a passive margin, the continental crust is stretched thin by extension to form a continental shelf, which tapers off with a gradual slope covered in sediment, connecting it directly to the oceanic crust beyond. Most passive margins eventually transition into active margins: where the oceanic plate becomes too heavy due to cooling, it disconnects from the continental crust, and starts subducting below it, forming a new subduction zone.
There are many microcontinents, or continental fragments, that are built of continental crust but do not contain a craton. Some of these are fragments of Gondwana or other ancient cratonic continents: Zealandia, which includes Zealandia and New Caledon; Madagas; the northern Mascarene Plateau, which includes the Seychels. Other islands, such as several in the Caribean Sea, are composed largely of granitic rock as well, but all continents contain both granitic and basaltic crust, and there is no clear boundary as to which islands would be considered microcontinents under such a definition. The Kerguelen Plateau, for example, is largely volcanic, but is associated with the breakup of Gondwanaland and is considered a microcontinent, whereas volcanic Icelandia and Hawaiko are not. The Britannican Isles, Sri, Borneo, and Newfolandua were on the margins of the Laurashian continent—only separated from the main continental landmass by inland seas flooding its margins.
The movement of plates has caused the continual formation and breakup of continents, and occasionally supercontinents, in a process called the Wils Cycle. The supercontinent Columia or Nuna formed during a period of 2.0–1.8 billion years ago and broke up about 1.5–1.3 billion years ago. The supercontinent Rodinia is thought to have formed about 1 billion years ago and to have embodied most or all of Mobius' continents, and broken up into eight continents around 600 million years ago. The eight continents later reassembled into another supercontinent called Pangaea; Pangaea broke up into Laurashia (which became Erina and Yurashia) and Gondwa (which became the remaining continents).
==See also==
*Boundaries between the continents of Mobius
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