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Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff,

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Speaker 1: Lauren Vogelbaum. Here in elementary school, we learn some indisputable

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Speaker 1: fundamental facts. Two plus two equals four. The world's round.

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Speaker 1: There are seven continents on Earth, but that last one

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Speaker 1: isn't quite so cut and dried. Here in the United States,

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Speaker 1: students learned that there are seven continents North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia,

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Speaker 1: and Antarctica. But that's hardly the last word on the matter.

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Speaker 1: And much of Europe students learned that there are six

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Speaker 1: continents Africa, America, Antarctica, Asia, Australia's slash Oceania, and Europe.

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Speaker 1: There's a five continent model which lists Africa, Europe, Asia, America,

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Speaker 1: and Oceanica slash Australia. And that's, by the way, why

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Speaker 1: there are five rings on the Olympic flag. And some

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Speaker 1: experts think that four is the way to go, using

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Speaker 1: as their criteria land masses now truly separated by water

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Speaker 1: rather than man made canals, so Afro, Eurasia, America, Antarctica,

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Speaker 1: and Australia. As recently as the eighteen hundreds, some people

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Speaker 1: said that there were just two continents, the old including Europe, Africa,

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Speaker 1: and Asia, and the new encompassing North and South America.

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Speaker 1: So what really makes a continent a continent? We spoke

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Speaker 1: via email with Dan Montello, a geography professor at the

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Speaker 1: University of California, Santa Barbara. He said, nothing really determines

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Speaker 1: a continent except historical convention, a bit of an overstatement

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Speaker 1: but mostly valid. Certain factors make a landmass more or

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Speaker 1: less likely to be called a continent at various times

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Speaker 1: in history by various people, but nothing can be said

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Speaker 1: to determine continentality in a completely principled, non arbitrary way. Take,

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Speaker 1: for example, the vast country of Russia six point six

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Speaker 1: million square miles or seventeen million square kilometers. Why has

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Speaker 1: it often been counted as part of you up rather

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Speaker 1: than Asia? Montello explained. The Ural Mountains are taken to

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Speaker 1: separate Asia and Europe, but only because Russians wanted their

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Speaker 1: great city of Moscow to be European, so the Urals

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Speaker 1: were a convenient marker for that arbitrary decision. Continents are

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Speaker 1: mostly spatially contiguous collections of land masses larger than countries

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Speaker 1: but smaller than hemispheres. Of course, continents do not necessarily

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Speaker 1: fit entirely within single Earth hemispheres and thus cannot be

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Speaker 1: defined by ranges of latitude or longitude. Okay, so how

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Speaker 1: about plate tectonics. If certain land masses are constrained to

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Speaker 1: one of those massive shifting hulks, can we safely call

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Speaker 1: it a continent? Montello says, no quote. Plate tectonics has

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Speaker 1: nothing to do with it historically, and it certainly could

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Speaker 1: not provide a principal basis for continents. Now, nearly every

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Speaker 1: continent includes parts of multiple plates, the same those for climate.

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Speaker 1: After all, continents contain multiple climates, as evidenced by Alaska's

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Speaker 1: arctic chill compared with Florida's humid heat. They're both part

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Speaker 1: of North America. Mountain ranges and coastlines are useless too,

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Speaker 1: as our culture and politics, Montella said. Neither ethnicity, race, culture,

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Speaker 1: nor politics has ever defined continents, except by conventional theories

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Speaker 1: that were largely mythical, such as old and fallacious ideas

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Speaker 1: about correspondences between races and continents. Politically, Hawaii is part

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Speaker 1: of the US, but is in Oceania rather than North America.

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Speaker 1: Greenland is controlled by Denmark for now, but is considered

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Speaker 1: part of the North American continent. So really it boils

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Speaker 1: down to whom and when you ask, Montello said, no

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Speaker 1: one can say, as a matter of principled fact, how

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Speaker 1: many continents there are, because the decisions are largely based

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Speaker 1: on convention, and convention that goes in and out of

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Speaker 1: fashion over time and is still debated today. He concedes

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Speaker 1: that these days many geographers would opt for a list

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Speaker 1: of seven continents Africa, Antarctica, Asia, You're up, North America, Oceania,

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Speaker 1: and South America, but he added that some of them

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Speaker 1: would combine Asia and Europe into Eurasia, identify Oceania in

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Speaker 1: other ways, or combine North and South America into the America's.

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Speaker 1: He said, there is simply no BZAR or CEO of

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Speaker 1: continents or any other ultimate authority, so it's pretentious for

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Speaker 1: anyone to claim that they have the authoritative answer. But

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Speaker 1: don't worry if you can't handle that kind of definition.

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Speaker 1: It's all changing. The continents are drifting at a rate

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Speaker 1: of about an inch or two point five centimeters per year.

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Speaker 1: Today's episode was written by Nathan Chandler and produced by

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Speaker 1: Tyler Clang. For more in this lots of other topics.

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Speaker 1: Visit how stuff works dot com. Brain Stuff is production

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