Questions tagged [continent]
The continent tag has no usage guidance.
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Formation of Mount Elbrus
Mount Elbrus, in the Caucasus region of Russia, 65 km southwest from Kislovodsk, is a major, isolated volcano in the heart of a continent-continent collision zone. It is not normal for volcanoes to ...
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How has the total area of continents changed during the Earth history?
Earth's total land area has increased throughout its history according to this video. What is the dependence of the total area of continents from time?
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Origin of the continents
Visiting from WorldBuilding SE. Someone recently asked a question that dusted off an old theory I had once had, so I started digging. Sadly I could find little more on the topic than the first time I ...
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Is continental drift a chaotic phenomenon?
Suppose that we reran Earth from two billion years ago changing the position of one atom. Would the continents drift to positions completely different from those today?
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To Determine the Geographic center of a continent, is balance point the accepted method and is equivalent to finding the centroid?
This is not exactly a pure Earth Science question but I'm not sure GIS SE is a suitable place either.
"The Google" suggested I watch CBS Sunday Morning's The debate over the geographical ...
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How do we know the Arctic is just ice?
If I look at an Earth's map, the Arctic/North Pole always appears just like water. Evidently this is actually covered by ice, with an area depending on the time of the year. If this area is bigger ...
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Does the position of the Earth's axis affect the position and shape of its continents?
If somehow we were to move the Earth's axis of rotation to, say, Mexico, making some spot in Mexico effectively the North Pole, would this change how the continental plates drift over time, thereby ...
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Why is Europe still considered a continent(along with Asia)? [closed]
It is true that there are multiple definitions of a continent. But it is also true that Europe fails to satisfy any of them. One of the boundaries between Europe and Asia was chose arbitrarily(the ...
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What was the Earth's continent's positions 10000 years ago, or 11700 years ago, AKA when the late Pleistocene epoch was coming to an end?
In many articles online, geologists and geographers have described and depicted the theorized locations of all our continental plates with great detail and illustration, providing pictures, time-lapse ...
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How to orient a globe of the earth so that maximum land mass is visible? [duplicate]
If you are viewing the world map on globe, where should you place the center of visible hemisphere so that the maximum land mass is visible. I think this should be somewhere near the Eurasian point of ...
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Is Australia the largest island?
I had participated in a quiz recently and one of the questions was 'which is the largest island in the world?'. I wrote Australia as the answer remembering that it was the 5th largest country in the ...
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Does subduction of continental crust happen at continental-continental convergent boundaries?
What exactly happens at a continental-continental (cc) convergent boundary? I read myself through the web for the last few days and what I came up with is that such a boundary will start as an oceanic-...
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Given that water will center over the mass of Earth, how could Pangaea be the only continent?
Consider this scenario: If the surface density of Earth were constant, it would follow that it would be impossible to have all land mass that is above the floor of the ocean concentrated on one side ...
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Why Do Supercontinents Form? [duplicate]
It would seem, on the face of it, improbable that the continental land-masses would accumulate into a single composite, yet it has happened numerous times, and is expected to again in the future.
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How do scientists reconstruct pre Cretaceous continent if all plates that are currently left are younger than Cretaceous?
I have read that the oldest oceanic plate that we see today is from the Cretaceous period. If so, how do scientists reconstruct plate movements and continental structure pre Cretaceous? And aren't all ...
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Do ocean level rise estimates account for mantle elasticity and plate mass changes?
In the mainstream media the problem of ocean level rise is presented rather... over-simplistically - ice melts -> more water flows into the oceans -> water level rises -> continents sink.
But it is ...
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Distortion-free map of all continents [closed]
I've been searching for a map that shows all continents in their actual size that is free of projection distortion, to no avail. Every map I found was of a particular projection type and as such ...
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Did the formation of Panama trigger the beginning of Ice Ages?
I have been studying ocean currents and associated energy flows in the eastern Pacific and western Atlantic oceans. I also looked at El Nino cycles.
I also noted when the large glacial periods ...
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How do tectonic plates move upward? [closed]
And also, can this push continents and land-masses upward as well?I have not been informed of the phenomenon of tectonic plates rising up.
I am yet unable to find a satisfactory answer on the internet,...
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How and when people first realized that Antarctica is a continent?
Recently I got startled by this question I asked myself and I can't seem to find any sources of answers.
I have hypotheses about how it could have happened:
It could have been by the fact that if you ...
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Is the continent with Australia in it Oceania or Australia?
I am making a quiz and I want to know whether Australia or Oceania is the continent? I have searched it on Google but I can't find an answer.
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Is Zealandia really big enough to be called a continent?
I was reading this article about Zealandia and got excited that there could be an underwater continent. However, when viewing the image (below) it appears that Zealandia is much smaller than any ...
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