How many continents are there?

[Logica Humano]

(11-10-2012 10:31 PM)Dark Light Wrote:  

(11-10-2012 08:52 PM)earmuffs Wrote:  lol!
Check your source brah.
I believe you took that from wiki. It says 5% is rock. But what it is referring too is coast line, 5% of the coast line is rock.

This is the map you should be looking at:


All the green is above sea level.

Huh? You criticized my source, and the used the same source? Eh, whatever....so your map shows the land under the ice, and the green is what it above sea level but it is still below ice. It isn't exposed land.

He used the same source with a better understanding of what it was conveying.

[Stark Raving]

I always learned in school that it was seven. However, I agree with chas......tectonic plates would be my first choice in determining a continent.

But what the fuck do I know?

[Dark Light]

(12-10-2012 03:12 AM)earmuffs Wrote:  

(11-10-2012 10:31 PM)Dark Light Wrote:  Huh? You criticized my source, and the used the same source? Eh, whatever....so your map shows the land under the ice, and the green is what it above sea level but it is still below ice. It isn't exposed land.

Parts of the source is what I meant.
Same source, different parts. Like different chapters in the same book.

So what it's not exposed? You can still walk on it, you can build on it, you can travel on it etc... Only the ice sheets melt away.
Hell, there is roughly 60 people on Antarctica living there for several months as we speak.

The point of a continent is that it's a large land mass. Antarctica is a large land mass that isn't near or part of any other land mass. So hence it's a continent.

How did you not know Antarctica had land? seriously?

When Antarctica melts will the land under the ice be exposed or underwater? If so how much? When the earth freezes over do the oceans count as part of of giant continent? By the way I had a friend in the Armee de la Air (French Air Force) who was stationed in Antartica for something like 5 months to asist the scientists, he showed me tons of pictures, told me stories, etc. I knew there was land, just not enough exposed land to constitute a continent. Is NZ a continent? No. Why? Because it doesn't have enough land to qualify.

[Dark Light]

(12-10-2012 02:01 PM)Stark Raving Wrote:  I always learned in school that it was seven. However, I agree with chas......tectonic plates would be my first choice in determining a continent.

But what the fuck do I know?

That was my first thought, but as I looked at the map for tectonic plates....ehh messy, some are really small, some are huge, some are all underwater. If you use tectonic plates solely to decide you may as well not bother, but Chas did make a logical conclusion. Earmuffs does too but I like to argue with him. It is all a matter of where do you draw the line (figuratively speaking, or literal.)

[Phaedrus]

Geologically speaking, a continent is a body of "continental" rock, meaning that the igneous rocks are mostly granitic in composition, rather than basaltic like oceanic plates and lava. It also must have significant above-water exposure; otherwise it'll be called the remnants of a continent, or such. A continent generally extends miles below the surface of the earth, and tens or hundreds of miles out from the shoreline.

A plate is not a continent. Continents often contain multiple plates, for instance Africa which is being torn in three. However it is still a contiguous body of granitic rock.


The continents using this definition are North America, South America, Eurasia, Africa, Australia, and Antarctica. So six.


North and South America are separate despite being connected by land, because the Central America landmass connecting them is basaltic lava from oceanic volcanoes, not continental rock. Africa is not part of Eurasia because it is connected only by a thin bridge of sedimentary rock at the Sinai peninsula. However, north Africa will eventually merge with Eurasia as it plows through the Mediterranean and dries it up. But the rest of Africa is heading south and east. Australia is a continent, however aside from New Guinea and a few other islands the rest of the Pacific does not qualify as part of it; those are volcanic islands made of basaltic rock with drastically different geology.

[Chas]

The number of continents is purely definitional, not absolute. And they change of over time.

[Humakt]

(12-10-2012 09:50 AM)kingschosen Wrote:  

(12-10-2012 09:44 AM)Aseptic Skeptic Wrote:  Thanks for the LOL, I thought I had gone unnoticed...

I always won because I would sit on Australia and let my friends beat the crap out of each other while I built up my army slowly but surely.

Then... I would blitzkrieg them.

My friends caught on after a couple of games, though. They started teaming up on me : /

A man after my own heart fortress Siam for the win.

[Phaedrus]

Fortress Asia ftw. If you can hold Asia for two turns you can hold it for the rest of the game, and if you pick your timing and your staging point carefully, taking Asia is a cake walk.

[Erxomai]

We need to have a TTA Risk Tournament.

[Stark Raving]

(12-10-2012 05:43 PM)Erxomai Wrote:  We need to have a TTA Risk Tournament.

Didn't we try that? And didn't it fail miserably?

Then again, I didn't even recognize the game. I have the board game, and it wasn't nearly as complex as the one we tried to play here.