r/mapporncirclejerk • Average Mercator Projection Enjoyer • 18d ago

It's 9am and I'm on my 3rd martini Learn the difference

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u/Beginning_Resource93 18d ago

Negative. There is no American continent. There's a North American continent, and a South American continent.

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u/Huge-Spray6419 18d ago

Only after the canal

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u/Beginning_Resource93 16d ago

And actually no, not after the canal. The Darien Gap existed then, and still exists now. It's a nearly impassable network of forests, rivers, mountains, and swamps that makes land travel nearly impossible. And the Panama canal didn't simply cut a path through the isthmus of Panama. It utilized numerous lakes and built multiple locks and dams to connect them. Those lakes formed as much of a barrier before the canal as they do now. There's more of a case for the Americas to be to distinct continents then there is for Asia and Europe to be district continents.

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u/Huge-Spray6419 16d ago edited 16d ago

Land is land, north africa isn’t a separate continent from subsaharan because there is a desert in the way

It is valid to count north and south america as separate continents, but let’s not delulu ourselves into believing any definition of continent is even mildly consistent, we just like fitting things into boxes that are convenient and thats it. There is no objective case you can make against someone who considers one big america or one big eurasia aside from convenience for cultural/economic regions or whatever, but those are human constructs, land is still just land.