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Continental drift is the theory, originating in the early 20th century, that Earth's continents move or drift relative to each other over geologic time. [1] The theory of continental drift has since been validated and incorporated into the science of plate tectonics, which studies the movement of the continents as they ride on plates of the Earth's lithosphere.
In geology, a continent is defined by continental crust, which is a platform of metamorphic and igneous rock, largely of granitic composition. Continental crust is less dense and much thicker than oceanic crust, which causes it to "float" higher than oceanic crust on the dense underlying mantle.
The continental boundaries are considered to be within the very narrow land connections joining the continents. The remaining boundaries concern the association of islands and archipelagos with specific continents, notably: the delineation between Africa, Asia, and Europe in the Mediterranean Sea; the delineation between Asia and Europe in the ...
The four parts of the world[2] or the four corners of the world refers to Africa (the "south"), the Americas (the "west"), Asia (the "east"), and Europe (the "north"). Depictions of personifications of the four continents became popular in several media. Sets of four could be placed around all sorts of four-sided objects, or in pairs along the ...
World map. A world map is a map of most or all of the surface of Earth. World maps, because of their scale, must deal with the problem of projection. Maps rendered in two dimensions by necessity distort the display of the three-dimensional surface of the Earth. While this is true of any map, these distortions reach extremes in a world map.
Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent after Asia. At about 30.3 million km 2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 20% of Earth 's land area and 6% of its total surface area. [ 7 ] With nearly 1.4 billion people as of 2021, it accounts for about 18% of the world's human population.
Sinistral transform. Plate tectonics (from Latin tectonicus, from Ancient Greek τεκτονικός (tektonikós) 'pertaining to building') is the scientific theory that Earth 's lithosphere comprises a number of large tectonic plates, which have been slowly moving since 3–4 billion years ago. The model builds on the concept of continental ...
Subduction. Subduction is a geological process in which the oceanic lithosphere and some continental lithosphere is recycled into the Earth's mantle at the convergent boundaries between tectonic plates. Where one tectonic plate converges with a second plate, the heavier plate dives beneath the other and sinks into the mantle.