Isn’t Australia called both a continent and a island?
Sure, I do it all the time. BTW, which mailbag column is this?
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Would this be the mailbag item to which you are referring?
Why are Europe and Asia considered separate continents? What’s a continent, anyway? (Apr-21-1999)
In there, the definition of continents as given is
with a couple of maybes thrown in for perhaps six or perhaps eight continents. I personally remember the list of continents as mentioned above, except our high school geography book listed, instead of Australia, Oceania, meaning Australia, New Zealand, and all those small islands in the Pacific.
I made a similar point in a thread about the difference between moons and space rocks:
Islands are smaller than continents, just as boats are smaller than ships and ponies are smaller than horses. There are no objective points with which to make a distinction. Basically, we follow the I know one when i see it! rule. When some people see Australia on a map, they see an island. Some people see a continent. With less than a couple dozen large islands and continents in the pool of examples, most people find that Austrailia falls somewhere in the middle, thus it is considered both.
That is why Geography falls into the realm of Liberal Arts and not Science.
If you want to know why Greenland is an island, Spam, you should do two things:
1: crumple up that crappy Mercator Projection map.
2: look at a globe.
To fit the surface of a sphere onto a rectangle, alot of distortion has to be made around the top and bottom (the poles of the globe). Thus, Greenland and Antarctica get a major ego boost.
Greenland is much, much smaller than it looks on a typical map. To look at a typical Mercator projection, you’ld think Greenland is larger than South America, when actually it’s about 1/8 the size of Brazil. Still a damn big island, but not a continent by any stretch.
–It was recently discovered that research causes cancer in rats.
Diceman, you miss the point. The Spam is noting that both Greenland and Eurasia fit the definition of an island, namely, land surrounded totally by water. This, of course, ignores an added part to the definition: an island is land totally surrounded by water and not so large that it was perceived as being a continent rather than an island. It is an example of how early terminology runs into trouble when it comes up against later knowledge (the term ‘planet’ is having similar difficulties in our solar system).
The land mass that is Eurasiafrica is surrounded by water, but to call it an island is considered silly; it accords to an island nothing special, because ALL land on the Earth is surrounded by water.
Yeah, well said.
Sorry. I thought Spam might have been basing his question on a mistaken notion of Greenland’s size. But yeah, like pornography, a “continent” is one those deals where you know it when you see it.
–It was recently discovered that research causes cancer in rats.
Also, in the “is it an island, is it a continent” discussion should be noted the following facts:
Australia: Sq. Miles - 2.25 million
Greenland: Sq. Miles - .84 million
The above figure for Australia excludes the roughly 26,000 sq mi. of Tasmania.
AND, it should be noted, Brazil is only 3.28 million Sq mi., thus Greenland is 1/4 the size of Brazil, NOT 1/8th. 
Antarctica has roughly 5.0 million sq. mi.
The main reasons, I think, that people consider Australia a continent are: A) it is geographically separate from the other continents, and B) it has considerably different wildlife. Stick it next to Asia’s main landmass, as close as Greenland is to North America’s, and maybe a different result occurs.
I was told, perhaps incorrectly, that some schools in Europe lump North and South America together as one continent (they are, after all, joined at the isthmus), giving them a total of six – or sometimes five, if they also consider Eurasia as a single entity.
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All water is surrounded by land, too. The oceans are really one big salt-water lake.
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