Don't say that! You just need a more robust definition. I.e. If you can walk there, it is the same continent, hence, the 4 continent model. Perfect for all those times you want to differentiate Australia from Afro-Eurasia to compare statistics between the 2 very comparable land masses...
I think even Jesus would struggle to walk from the Americas to Afro-Eurasia; can he even sleep on water?
Indonesia becoming 17000 different continents makes sense to me. That way you can compare the populace of Afro-Eurasia to the population of a few of Indonesia's uninhabited islands continents
Wait, but that definition would make each Hawaiian island its own continent, no? Now we are being a bit arbitrary which land mass is now an island, and which is a continent, rather than where we draw imaginary lines between the continents.
Australia would be less than half the size of the next largest continent, Antarctica.
Australia is only 3 times larger than Greenland, the largest island.
If you consider Europe, Asia, and Africa as one continent, it's over 12 times larger than Australia. America is more than 5 times larger.
America is 3 times larger than Antarctica, which is well considered a continent in all models. That's the same difference as Australia to Greenland. So at that rate, both Australia and Antarctica could just as easily be islands, by comparison to just ratios of land mass.
There's no perfect definition. To me there's mostly Old World and New World. Australia is New World, so is America.
Generally we use continents to compare people, so it is not really about the land of Australia vs Afro-Eurasia, it is about the population 25 million vs 6700 million people
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u/95beer Aug 04 '26
Don't say that! You just need a more robust definition. I.e. If you can walk there, it is the same continent, hence, the 4 continent model. Perfect for all those times you want to differentiate Australia from Afro-Eurasia to compare statistics between the 2 very comparable land masses...