Random Continent Generator

How this random continent generator works

Press Generate and you get a continent. There are seven, so the Number box tops out at seven.

Africa. Antarctica. Asia. Europe. North America. South America. And Australia (Oceania).

Look at that last one again. The brackets are the sound of a compromise, and they are doing more work than any other punctuation mark in geography.

Australia, or Oceania?

Australia is a continent: a single landmass, its own tectonic plate, a coastline you can sail around.

Oceania is not a continent. It is a region, and it contains Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, and several thousand islands spread across a third of the surface of the planet. Most of it is water.

So which is the continent?

If you say Australia, then New Zealand belongs to no continent at all, which is a strange thing to tell five million people. If you say Oceania, you have called a scattering of islands across an ocean a continuous landmass, which is the one thing the word continent originally meant.

Nobody has solved this. Every atlas prints one answer or the other, and the ones that print both in brackets are simply being honest.

Seven, or six, or five

Ask a class in Britain how many continents there are and you will get seven. Ask in Italy or Brazil and you may get six, because North and South America are taught as one continent called America, and they are joined at Panama.

Ask in Russia and you may also get six, but a different six, because Europe and Asia are one landmass and the boundary between them is a line somebody drew along a modest mountain range.

Five is a live answer too, dropping Antarctica on the grounds that nobody lives there.

None of these people is wrong. They were taught different conventions, and a convention is not a fact. The seven-continent model that English speakers think of as obvious is a regional habit, roughly as universal as driving on the left.

There is no scientific definition of a continent

This is the part that surprises people. Geology does not hand you a list.

Continents are large. They are made of continental crust, which is thick and granitic, rather than oceanic crust, which is thin and basaltic. They stand above the deep ocean floor. Beyond that, where you draw the lines is a matter of what you find convenient.

Europe and Asia sit on one plate and one landmass. Africa is joined to Asia at Suez, and the only thing separating them there is a canal somebody dug. India is a continental fragment that crashed into Asia and is still pushing.

The word comes from the Latin terra continens, continuous land. On that reading there are four continents, or two, and Europe is a peninsula.

The eighth one is underwater

Because there was no definition, somebody had to write one down before a new continent could be recognised. In 2017, somebody did.

On 10 February 2017, the Geological Society of America published a paper in GSA Today called Zealandia: Earth's Hidden Continent. Its authors were geologists from GNS Science in New Zealand, Victoria University of Wellington, the Geological Survey of New Caledonia and the University of Sydney.

They set out four tests. A continent must stand high above the surrounding ocean floor. It must be built of a distinctive range of continental rocks. It must have crust thicker than the ocean floor around it. And it must have well-defined limits and cover a large enough area to be more than a fragment.

Zealandia passes all four. It runs to 4.9 million square kilometres of the southwest Pacific, and its crust is far thicker than the seven kilometres or so of the abyssal plain.

Roughly 94 percent of it is underwater. The parts that break the surface are New Zealand's two main islands, New Caledonia, and a handful of rocks. Everything else, the Lord Howe Rise, the Challenger Plateau, the Campbell Plateau, is a drowned country.

The name was proposed by the geophysicist Bruce Luyendyk in 1995. It took twenty-two years for the case to be made in print, and until 2023 for the whole thing to be geologically mapped.

As the lead author observed, if the ocean were not there, nobody would ever have argued about it.

Ways people actually use this

• Quizzes and lessons. Ask for the seven. Then ask why Australia has a second name.
• Random assignment. Seven buckets, evenly weighted, which is exactly wrong. Asia holds most of the world's people. Antarctica holds none.
• Test data. Fine, but pick a model and write it down, because your colleague in Madrid is using a different one.
• Settling an argument. You will not settle it.

Getting more out of the filters

• With seven entries the filters are mostly a curiosity, but Contains still works. Type America for the two, which is the entire six-versus-seven argument in one query.
• Type a into Contains and only Europe escapes.
• Starts with and Ends with take a single character. Starts with A gives you Africa, Antarctica, Asia and Australia.
• Set Number to seven and you have the whole world. This is the only tool on the site where that is a sensible thing to do.

Questions people ask

How many continents are there?

Seven, in the model taught across most of the English-speaking world. Six in much of Europe and Latin America, where the Americas are one continent, and six again in Russia, where Europe and Asia are combined instead. Five if you drop Antarctica.

Is it Australia or Oceania?

Australia is the continent, a single landmass on its own plate. Oceania is the wider region including New Zealand and the Pacific islands. Lists that say "Australia (Oceania)" are refusing to choose.

Is Zealandia a real continent?

A 2017 paper in GSA Today argued that it meets all four geological criteria for continental status. It covers 4.9 million square kilometres and about 94 percent of it lies beneath the Pacific. Whether it appears on a map is a separate question from whether the geology holds.

What makes something a continent?

Geologically: elevation above the ocean floor, continental rather than oceanic rock, thicker crust, and a large well-defined area. Culturally: whatever your school taught you. The two do not always agree.

Why are Europe and Asia separate?

For historical and cultural reasons, not physical ones. They are one landmass on one plate, and the conventional border follows the Ural Mountains and the Caucasus, which is a line of agreement rather than a line of geology.

References

1. Mortimer and others, Zealandia: Earth's Hidden Continent, GSA Today 27(3)
2. Zealandia becomes the first continent to be completely mapped, GNS Science
3. New hidden continent mostly underwater, GNS Science