• bdonvr@thelemmy.club
    106·
    23 hours ago

    I mean it’s greatly exaggerated on Mercator but it’s definitely not tiny.

    It’s bigger than Australia

    • grue@lemmy.world
      19·
      20 hours ago

      That outline is like the entire continental shelf, or all the area where the glaciers are directly over rock (as opposed to having ocean in between), or something like that.

      But if the ice weren’t there, not all of it would actually be above sea level:

      Might actually be smaller than Australia if the ice were gone, give or take things like sea level rise and isostatic rebound.

        • thebestaquaman@lemmy.world
          2·
          10 hours ago

          I may be mistaken here, but I think the concept of a “continental shelf” is pretty well defined geologically. That is: Outside a land mass, the ocean floor extends a certain distance before dropping off to the deep ocean floor. An island would be a piece of land that sticks out of the sea from this continental shelf, while the “continent” includes the entire shelf, and all the land masses that stick out of the ocean on that shelf.

          Of course, this seems to break down a bit for e.g. the Europe/Asia divide (and probably a lot more), but the concept of “continents” vs. “islands” can make sense geologically, although the “continents” are then different from the geopolitical borders ones we usually talk about.

          • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
            1·
            5 hours ago

            That definition however does some weird things like saying that Tokyo and parts of Siberia are in North America, but Panama and Los Angeles aren’t.

            A continent is mostly just a social convention for a bigass geographic and geological structure that is above sea level and largely geologically and culturally separated. North and South America are connected by a land bridge, but that’s really recent in evolutionary time and it’s a real pain in the ass to cross. Europe and Asia are historically separated by the Ural mountains, but it’s hard to look at them in modern day and say “these are two distinct landmasses” especially if you’re saying India isn’t, but historically getting from Europe to what’s worth going to in Asia has involved crossing the Mediterranean much like getting to Africa or sailing around Africa in the early modern period. Australia is a giant landmass with not much else around as is Antarctica.

        • pHr34kY@lemmy.world
          2·
          14 hours ago

          By definition, a continent and an island are mutually exclusive. Nothing can be both.

          Australia isn’t a continent either. It’s in the continent of Oceania, which includes New Zealand.

          Antarctica is a continent in its own right. It’s not a country and not a nation.

          • bdonvr@thelemmy.club
            13·
            22 hours ago

            I think I remember being told Greenland was the largest island, while Australia was a continent

            Something to do with tectonic plates

            • lugal@lemmy.dbzer0.com
              131·
              22 hours ago

              Continents is a human made construct that’s later rationalized with tectonic plates and other criteria. Basically, people around the Mediterranean Sea divided the Mediterranean Coast into 3 parts and later extended this concept.

            • nightlily@leminal.spaceEnglish
              4·
              21 hours ago

              If you go by the geological definition, Australia is a continent, as is Zealandia. That’s right, New Zealand has equal geological footing with the entirety of Eurasia.

        • dohpaz42@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          21 hours ago

          Not all continents, no. Islands are bodies of land surrounded by water on all sides, no? Wouldn’t Antarctica and Australia then qualify by that definition?

            • dohpaz42@lemmy.worldEnglish
              4·
              20 hours ago

              But most of the land that are considered continents are connected to one or kore other land, and thus couldn’t be defined as an island.

              Though, after reading a few other comments, it seems the definition of what makes a continent a continent is apparently subject to debate.

              ~This is why we can’t have nice things.~

    • skisnow@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      19 hours ago

      Nice. What did you use for that one?

      https://niy.ai/worldmap lets you reproject Mercator to put any landmass you want in the middle by clicking on it, but it doesn’t have that overlay thing.

  • skisnow@lemmy.caEnglish
    8·
    19 hours ago

    Fun fact, Mercator would in principle be even more distorted than it is, but almost every map that uses it crops at least the top and bottom 5 degrees to hide it. Mercator’s original cropped to 66°S - 80°N, which shifts Europe towards the middle.

    • thebestaquaman@lemmy.world
      5·
      10 hours ago

      Another fun-fact: The Mercator projection was, at its inception, the first map that could be used for long-distance sea navigation over the mediterranean and Atlantic in the sense that axes are scaled such that courses plotted on the map actually match the compass course you need to follow to get somewhere. This also happens to be the reason it became popular, and the reason it was made, rather than the commonly quoted reason of “making Europe big at the expense of things closer to the equator”.

      • katkit@lemmy.world
        2·
        8 hours ago

        And Mercator means merchant in Latin. I thought that was because of the projection’s purpose, but turns out that the inventer’s name was actually Mercator, which was a latinisation of his Flemish birthname Kremer (meaning grocer or merchant).

        • thebestaquaman@lemmy.world
          3·
          6 hours ago

          Now that is a fun-fact! I knew the guy was called Mercator, but didn’t know about the Latin origin, and can definitely see the origin of the name spreading as a misconception.

    • MufinMcFlufin@lemmy.world
      2·
      17 hours ago

      Are we going with Eurasia or an Afro-Eurasia distinction? I feel like if someone were to insist on Afro-Eurasia then they also have to accept The Americas, or I guess it would just be a simple “America” which would get confusing since that’s a pretty common verbal shorthand for USA. Under that sort of definition I think if you still insist on North and South America as regions then you’d have to also accept North and South Afro-Eurasia.

      It’d also be pretty funny to try to argue that since North America was connected to Asia within the human timeline it should also be added. Imagine trying to refer to the continents: AfroAmeriEurasia, Australia, and Antarctic, with an optional Oceania thrown in the mix.

      For clarity, I usually just go with North/South America, Australia, Antarctica, Africa, and Eurasia as the continental landmasses