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Continents aren’t really a thing. You think they are, but they’re not, just vague lazy terms for general areas, as if we were waving our fingers vaguely over a novelty schoolroom globe.

Different countries teach different labels for the larger land masses of the world, and frankly, the only one that everybody actually agrees on is Antarctica – so Antarctica, by the power of consensus, is the only continent that actually exists.

Let us take you further into this metageographical mapping mind mess and show you a few continents that you didn’t realise existed.

America

Ok, you think you’ve heard of this one, but then you probably think there’s two of them. Wrong, it’s one big continent.

It’s all a continuous landmass after all, so who’s to say what the right definition is. It also makes the label Central America, given to the thin strip of countries in the middle such as Panama, Honduras and Guatemala, all the more appropriate.

Eurasia

Another label that simply makes loads more sense. Look at the current allocation of Russia. It’s a European country, apparently, and yet its eastern front stretches to the very end of Asia.

So, the biggest country in Asia is European?? That makes no sense whatsoever. Let’s just call the whole thing Eurasia and be done with this silly separation.

Eufrasia

The biggest continent of them all is the merging of Europe, Africa and Asia. Eufrasia (also known as Afro-Eurasia) does make a lot of sense seeing as it is all continuous landmass.

It also really helps when thinking about the Middle East, an area that sits awkwardly on the verge of all three traditional continents – it suddenly becomes Central Eufrasia. Much easier.

Australia

Yeah, some people think Australia is a continent. It’s not, it’s just a country, but let’s go with their wild ideas. In the definition of Australia as a continent, it includes the country of Australia, New Guinea and a couple other small places such as Timor and Seram.

Essentially, it’s like insisting the United Kingdom and Ireland is a continent – ludicrous.

Zealandia

Similar to the problem with calling Australia a continent by itself, the smaller upstart New Zealand wants to do the same.

Traditionally New Zealand is part of Polynesia, the continent that includes most of the islands in the Pacific Ocean, but some bright sparks like to think the country is a continent outright.

Well, technically it’s ten times the size of New Zealand but all the other parts of Zealandia are deep underwater. Again, a pointless labelling.

Oceania

No, not the name of a nightclub in Coventry, but an all-inclusive continent that marries up some disparate groups into one handy package. In many English schools, they like to teach that Australasia is a continent, but that’s useless as it only covers Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea and Melanesia, completely ignoring the majority of Polynesian islands such as Fiji and Samoa, as well as Micronesia, home to the Marshall Islands and Kiribati.

But then, all these different mini-continents in one place is too confusing. The blanket term Oceania sounds good, feels good, is good.

Admittedly, George Orwell did use the name for the super-continent that includes England in his dystopian novel 1984, but let’s try keep fictional continental labelling and practical continental labelling clearly separate in our minds.

Pangaea Ultima

Many people have heard of Pangaea, the supercontinent that all present day landmasses were once a part of around 250 million years ago. It broke apart into Laurasia and Gondwana and so on and so on, the plates drifting around the globe until we come to the current arrangement.

But did you realise that the continents are going to keep on shifting and bashing into each other? One of the theories for the future is that ultimately all the landmass will be back in one supercontinent yet again: Pangaea Ultima. Cool or what?

So what have we learned? That in a perfect pre-Pangaea Ultima world, we should recognise that the only current continents are America, Eufrasia, Oceania and Antarctica. That’s all we need, as you now know.

(Featured image: Horseshoe Bend, Page, Arizona by Wolfgang Staudt)

About the author

Adam ZulawskiAdam is a freelance writer and Polish-to-English translator. He blogs passionately about travel for Cheapflights and runs TranslatingMarek.com. Download his free e-book about Poland's capital after it was almost completely destroyed by the Nazis: 'In the Shadow of the Mechanised Apocalypse: Warsaw 1946'

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