This came up at dinner the other night, and vigorous digging through the almanac, dictionary, encyclopedia, and an atlas did not give any answer to this question at all…
So, is New Zealand part of a continent, or is it floating outside belonging to any continent?
PS I searched, but did not turn up anything that really answers this…surprised it never came up before!
Bill
It’s part of Australia but the Kiwis stole it and rowed it over there.
The definition of a ‘continent’ is iffy at best. We are near the Australian continent, but we sure aren’t going to call ourselves Australians :D.
NZ was formed by volacanic activity by the collision of the Indo-Australian and Pacific plates, so it probably doesn’t count as a continent.
Generally, people include NZ as part of ‘Austaliasia’(Aust. and NZ) or just the ‘Pacific’/‘Oceania’.
Geographically, is it on a plate? When we’re talking about actual geography and not political boundaries/identities, I prefer to use plates.
New Zealand is on it’s own plate. It is not currently part of any continent. Sometimes chunks of continental shelf break off and drift away, and there’s nothing you can do to stop them…no matter how much you…(sob)…love them…
This map shows New Zealand as straddling the boundry of the indo-australian and the pacific plates. There’s deep water between New Zealand and australia (crummy CIA map). NZ looks to be a similar case to Iceland, which is on its own, continent-wise.
New Zealand sits atop the suture between the Indian-Australasian Plate and the Pacific Plate, and is probably the main current example of the “microcontinent” concept – the pieces of land smaller than Greenland that originate in volcanic island arcs and end up attaching themselves to continents after significant drift time. The area around Sonoma County, CA, is one famous former microcontinent – it originated somewhere in the South Pacific and then drifted north and east to collide with the West Coast. There are about a dozen such “exotic terranes” scattered up and down the West Coast, which is mostly made up of a patchwork of them.
New Zealand isn’t part of a continent, we’re a series of islands (as Polycarp explained, on the edge of two tectonic plates). We’re just as much a continent as, say, Iceland.
Polycarp answered in geological terms, but the word “continent” is also often used in a geographical and cultural or political sense as well, in which case the term is a good bit fuzzier. Americans usually divide the world into seven continents (Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America), but there are other systems which divvy up the world into six continents (Africa, Antarctica, Eurasia, North America, Oceania, and South America) or even only five continents (Africa, America, Antarctica, Eurasia, and Oceania). In the latter two systems, New Zealand would be included in Oceania, a term variously used to mean the Pacific islands, or the Pacific islands together with Australia (and sometimes even including the Malay Archipelago, generally otherwise included in the geographic continent of Asia). New Zealand may also be included in the ethnographic island grouping of Polynesia (one of the subdivisions of the larger Oceania).
Moderator’s Note: Duplicate threads merged.
Maybe I’m hallucinating, but I’m certain that a NZ hiker (met in the Swiss Alps) told me he was from “the other Asia.” I didn’t understand, so I asked him what he meant, and he said NZ.
With continent, according to Merriam-Webster, as "one of the six or seven great divisions of land on the globe ", could you really state that a series of islands in the Pacific Ocean, where the total area is vastly more sea than land, is a continent?
I can see, to keep things neat, that there is a preference to equate “region” with “continent”. NZ is part of two regions, yes. I can also see, though, this ending up in discussions similar to an earlier one on what constitutes a forest (that one came down to a conclusion, under certain criteria, that it could mean a lone tree.)
From Austral-asia, possibly. 
I’m a geophysicist. From an earth scientist’s point of view, New Zealand’s piece of the Earth’s crust is not now a part of Australia or Asia.
Cultural boundaries and regional classifications have been noted. Those are not really relevant here.
That’s sort of a debatable point. I’m pretty sure “continents” predate our knowledge of plate tectonics or any sort of scientific understanding of geology. Granted, including New Zealand and other islands in any “continent” is basically pretty arbitrary and done mostly out of a sense of tidiness, but the reason why North America, South America, Africa, and so on are considered “continents” is because they’re large contiguous areas of land; geographical continents do correspond reasonably well with geophysical plates, but on the other hand, they certainly don’t correspond perfectly.
Mr. Buckner, I have little doubt that a cultural connection can be established between our Ozies and our Kiwis. The question I thought at hand was of a more geological bent.
I have to go to bed now.
As Polycarp and others have said, New Zealand isn’t part of any continent per se. Here’s a link to the Geological society of New Zealand (with a cool picture of Te Mata peak - which makes me homesick for Hawkes Bay).
According to the questions and answers page from that site New Zealand has been bobbing up and down for the last 100 million years, with the current incarnation emerging 25 million years ago. This link should take you to their brief explanation of New Zealand geology.
Resurrecting this thread after a couple of weeks, for a bit more detail:
The modern theory of physical geology is based on plate tectonics – that Earth’s crust is composed of about a dozen major plates, some of which have land on them and some of which do not, which are moved around by forces based in the mantle, and which tend to collide. By this definition India (formerly part of Gondwanaland) is a separate continent from the rest of Asia, with which it collided, driving up the Himalayas, the Karakorums, and the rest of the high Asian mountains in the process. The islands of northern Nunavut and Greenland are geophysically part of North America by this standard. Arabia and Spain were parts of Africa until a couple dozen million years ago, when they collided with Asia and Europe respectively – and Arabia, and eastern Africa, are in the process of rifting off from the rest of Africa. New Guinea is part of Australia in this sense.
The Pacific Plate, and the smaller Nazca and Cocos Plates off Central and South America, are nearly exclusively ocean (Baja California and California west of the San Andreas are on the Pacific Plate).
Okay, given all that, if the map I’m working with is accurate, South Island is on the Australian Plate, which cuts off abruptly along its east coast (some of which may be seam accretion), but North Island is almost totally the product of vulcanism from the seam between the plates. (It didn’t pick up on Stewart Island, but from the looks it’s well onto the Australian Plate.) The Kermadec Islands, by the way, are more seam-vulcanism.
The Mid-Atlantic Ridge was raised by vulcanism along the seam between the Eurasian and North American plates, with Iceland, the Azores, and St. Helena being parts of the same that rose above sea level.