Eurasia
Where does Europe stop and Asia begin? Apparently this is a never-ending
controversy for geographers, politicians and others.
* * *
One popular definition for Asia asserts:
The continent of the eastern hemisphere north of the equator forming a single landmass with
Europe (the conventional dividing line between Asia and Europe being the Ural
Mountains and the main range of the Caucasus Mountains); has numerous large
offshore islands including Cyprus, Sri Lanka, Malay Archipelago, Taiwan, the
Japanese chain, and Sakhalin. Total area is 17,139,445 square miles.
Of course this begs the question of which continent places like Turkey, aka Asia Minor,
Israel and Saudi Arabia can call their own. (By the way the same source defines
Asia Minor as the "western extremity of Asia".)
* * *
A couple of centuries ago, those who liked to study the earth, including earthquakes and
volcanoes, started to notice the frequent proximity of the two types of events.
They started to connect the dots between eruptions and temblors and soon found
they resolved down to not very many roughly-defined lines. These lines as it turned
out were not happenstance, but actually the borders between continents. And shockingly
enough to tiny humans crawling about this big earth, these continents are hardly the
stable platforms they seemed to be. They are not locked down at all, but instead
float on incredibly hot magma, driven here and there by varying amounts of heat and
frequently run into one another, often the cause of the earthquakes. They also can
have holes. Such a hole has created the Hawai'ian island chain as the Pacific plate
slides by.
* * *
Admittedly Europe is an idea as much as a region, but why isn't there more recognition
of the true nature of continents? Geographers don't know this level of detail
and geologists don't care about this level of abstraction?
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