continent
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What is a continent?
What is the largest continent?
Do continents move?
What is the Pangea supercontinent?
continent, one of the larger continuous masses of land, namely, Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Antarctica, Europe, and Australia, listed in order of size. (Europe and Asia are sometimes considered a single continent, Eurasia.)
There is great variation in the sizes of continents; Asia is more than five times as large as Australia. The largest island in the world, Greenland, is only about one-fourth the size of Australia. The continents differ sharply in their degree of compactness. Africa has the most regular coastline and, consequently, the lowest ratio of coastline to total area. Europe is the most irregular and indented and has by far the highest ratio of coastline to total area.
The continents are not distributed evenly over the surface of the globe. If a hemisphere map centred in northwestern Europe is drawn, most of the world’s land area can be seen to lie within that hemisphere. More than two-thirds of the Earth’s land surface lies north of the Equator, and all the continents except Antarctica are wedge shaped, wider in the north than they are in the south.
The distribution of the continental platforms and ocean basins on the surface of the globe and the distribution of the major landform features have long been among the most intriguing problems for scientific investigation and theorizing. Among the many hypotheses that have been offered as explanation are: (1) the tetrahedral (four-faced) theory, in which a cooling earth assumes the shape of a tetrahedron by spherical collapse; (2) the accretion theory, in which younger rocks attached to older shield areas became buckled to form the landforms; (3) the continental-drift theory, in which an ancient floating continent drifted apart; and (4) the convection-current theory, in which convection currents in the Earth’s interior dragged the crust to cause folding and mountain making.
Geological and seismological evidence accumulated in the 20th century indicates that the continental platforms do “float” on a crust of heavier material that forms a layer completely enveloping the Earth. Each continent has one of the so-called shield areas that formed 2 billion to 4 billion years ago and is the core of the continent to which the remainder (most of the continent) has been added. Even the rocks of the extremely old shield areas are older in the centre and younger toward the margins, indicating that this process of accumulation started early. In North America the whole northeast quarter of the continent, called the Canadian, or Laurentian, Shield, is characterized by the ancient rocks of what might be called the original continent. In Europe the shield area underlies the eastern Scandinavian peninsula and Finland. The Guiana Highlands of South America are the core of that continent. Much of eastern Siberia is underlain by the ancient rocks, as are western Australia and southern Africa. See also continental drift.
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North America: General considerationsContinents have collided and broken apart repeatedly over geologic time. When they separate, new ocean basins develop between the diverging pieces through the process of seafloor spreading. Spreading, which originates at oceanic ridges, is compensated (to conserve surface area on the planet) by subduction—the process…
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Precambrian: Basic dikesThe continents were sufficiently stable and rigid during the Proterozoic Eon for an extremely large number of basic dikes to be intruded into parallel, extensional fractures in major swarms. Individual dikes measure up to several hundred metres in width and length, and there may be hundreds…
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Precambrian: Proterozoic plate movements…the collision of arcs and continents could now give rise to both sutures with ophiolites and to Himalayan-type (formed by continent-to-continent collision) thrust belts with abundant crustal-melt granites. These were key events in the evolution of the continents, and such processes have continued throughout Earth history.…