As it has been 28 years since the publication of The Myth of Continents, a book that I jointly wrote with my wife, Karen Wigen, it is time for a reconsideration of the work. The main thesis of the book is that although most continents are rooted in physical geography, the larger continental system of global division is an intellectual construct the veers far from the realities of both the natural and cultural realms. Continents are supposed to be large bodies of land that are separated– or almost separated– from other large landmasses by intervening waterways. But Europe and Asia, the two original continents around which the entire system evolved, have no such separation. Owing to its clunky nature, inconsistencies, and failure to correspond with the most important divisions of either the natural world or humankind, the continental scheme was long ago abandoned by scholars and other serious thinkers. Yet no matter how often it is discredited, the division of the world into a handful of continents remains entrenched, a zombie idea that somehow manages to defy extinction.
My assessments of the impact and success of The Myth of Continents after more than a quarter century are decidedly mixed. One the hand, the book has been by far my most widely cited publication. It still sells relatively well and continues to be used as a text in a few university lecture courses and seminars, mostly in world history. The issues that it explored remain germane and continue to command attention. Every few years, or so it seems, I am contacted by a journalist seeking information on how many continents actually exist and why the landmasses of the world are divided as they are.
But on the other hand, The Myth of Continents has had negligible impact on the public geographical imagination and has had no discernible influence on the way that geography is taught to children and adolescents. Continents are still regarded as the most basic components of world geography, and in the English-speaking world the seven-continent system is still taken-for-granted, as an internet image search for “continents map” quickly reveals. There is little public understanding of the conventional nature of the standard continental scheme, which lacks anything like a secure definitional basis.
Elemental instruction in world geography unfortunately often begins with the seven supposed continents, but that is only one of its many problems. When I see an educational product like the one posted below, my heart sinks. To begin with, the map in this graphic ineptly depicts the world. With a too-narrow Atlantic Ocean, it places Iceland to the northeast rather than to the northwest of Britain. Nor does it get the standard seven-continent model right, as New Zealand, Fiji, and the Solomon Islands, have never, to my knowledge, been classified as parts of the continent of Australia. Most troublesome is the use of a Mercator projection. The Mercator world map, in which the lines of longitude that converge at the poles are rendered as straight, non-converging parallel lines, is a brilliant navigational tool.* It is utterly inappropriate, however, for general-purpose and especially educational maps. Students constantly exposed to such a world depiction are misguided into thinking that Greenland is as large as South America. The result is little short of pedagogical malpractice.
The Wikipedia article on continents does a commendable job of exploring this complex and fraught topic. It notes that the term “continent” is essentially undefined, and that, as a result, the number of accepted continents varies between four and seven. An animated map admirably depicts these 4-, 5-, 6-, and 7-fold divisional systems. The caption notes that the map only shows “some continents” while further explaining that it groups the “region of Oceania” with the “continent of Australia” through color. The beginning of the article nicely sets a tone of ambiguity:
A continent is any of several large geographical regions. Continents are generally identified by convention rather than any strict criteria. A continent could be a single large landmass, a part of a very large landmass, as in the case of Asia or Europe within Europe, or a landmass and nearby islands within its continental shelf. Due to these varying definitions, the number of continents varies; up to seven or as few as four geographical regions are commonly regarded as continents.
But although this opening paragraph contends that there can be as many as seven continents, the article later allows the inclusion of an eighth, the mostly submerged landmass of Zealandia. It also discusses the existence of “micro” continents; if these are included, the list of continents grows considerable larger. While most micro-continents are arguably too small to merit the designation, Madagascar is a huge island that can easily merit continental status, based on both geological and evolutionary criteria.
Although the Wikipedia article allows the division of the world into more than seven continents, it misses the feasibility of dividing it into fewer than four. But North America can easily be construed as an extension of Eurasia. The waterway separating these landmasses, the Bering Strait, is only 82 kilometers (51 miles) wide and contains several islands in the middle of the passage. More to the point, a vast stretch of the sea separating the two landmasses is very shallow and is underlain by the continental crust of a continental shelf. Over much of the past several hundred thousand years it has been dry land, due to the lower sea-levels that characterized glacial periods (“ice ages”; see the map posted below). This periodic land connection between Asia and North America allowed many temperate-zone and arctic animal species, including humans, to pass between the two “continents,” giving them somewhat similar mammalian faunas. Given the physical connection that exists between North and South America, this perspective yields a three-fold continental division: Antarctica, Australia, and a massive stretch of land that might be dubbed “AmerAfroEurasia.”
If one is thinking in biological rather than geological terms, one might exclude Antarctica from the list of continents, as its macroscopic terrestrial fauna and flora is almost nonexistent. Following this line of thinking, we would then be down to two continents: Australia and AmerAfroEurasia. But the size difference between these two units is so large that that the entire scheme becomes questionable. From this perspective, Australia would perhaps best be seen as an extremely large island, or perhaps as a massive archipelago that encompasses New Guinea and Tasmania.
The next series of GeoCurrents posts will examine in some detail the division of the world into continents, paying attention to its possible usefulness as well as to the problems and paradoxes that it entails. This series will also reexamine the intellectual evolution of the idea of continents, a topic that is covered in some depth in The Myth of Continents. It will begin with an exploration of the geological basis of the scheme, starting with the division of the world into tectonic plates.
The forthcoming GeoCurrents series on continents is part of a larger initiative that I am envisioning that might best be called “advanced elementary geography.” I am also contemplating a related project on “elementary elementary geography,” which would focus on geographical works aimed at children.
*The Mercator projection is the only map projection in which a constant compass bearing can be plotted as a straight line.