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An island can also be entirely oceanic while still being associated with a continent by geology (e.g. Bermuda, the Australian Indian Ocean Territories) or by common geopolitical convention (e.g. Ascension Island, the South Sandwich Islands). Another example is the grouping into Oceania of the Pacific Islands with Australia and Zealandia.
The name "Pangaea" is derived from Ancient Greek pan (πᾶν, "all, entire, whole") and Gaia or Gaea (Γαῖα, "Mother Earth, land"). [4] [9] The first to suggest that the continents were once joined and later separated may have been Abraham Ortelius in 1596. [10]
Ringmann may have been misled into crediting Vespucci by the widely published Soderini Letter, a sensationalized version of one of Vespucci's actual letters reporting on the mapping of the South American coast, which glamorized his discoveries and implied that he had recognized that South America was a continent separate from Asia. [19]
Northern America—the northern region of the North American continent, including Canada, the United States, Greenland, Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, and Bermuda. Latin America and the Caribbean-extending from The Bahamas and Mexico to Argentina and Chile. Central America—the countries south of Mexico and north of Colombia. The Caribbean.
The map of North America with the Western Interior Seaway during the Campanian. The Western Interior Seaway (also called the Cretaceous Seaway, the Niobraran Sea, the North American Inland Sea, or the Western Interior Sea) was a large inland sea that split the continent of North America into two landmasses for 34 million years.
Since the 1950s, [17] however, North America and South America have generally been considered by English speakers as separate continents, and taken together are called the Americas, or more rarely America. [18] [19] [3] When conceived as a unitary continent, the form is generally the continent of America in the singular.
The idea of dry land in the southern climes, the Terra Australis, was introduced by Ptolemy and appears on European maps as an imaginary continent from the 15th century. Antipodes was what Giovanni Contarini, on his world map of 1506 called the land later named America by Martin Waldseemüller. [23]
The Continental Divide in North America in red and other drainage divides in North America The Continental Divide in Central America and South America. The Continental Divide of the Americas (also known as the Great Divide, the Western Divide or simply the Continental Divide; Spanish: Divisoria continental de las Américas, Gran Divisoria) is the principal, and largely mountainous ...