• Rolando@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      FWIW I grew up in Central America and we didn’t consider it part of North America.

      I mean, if a geology teacher said it was, we’d write it down on the test that it was, but no-one thought of it that way.

      • Please_Do_Not
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        2 months ago

        Interesting, so North America was just the US and Canada to you?

        • I'm back on my BS 🤪@lemmy.autism.place
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          2 months ago

          Latinoamerica divides up the Americas by ethnicity. North America is USA and Canada, Jamaica, the Bahamas, Trinidad & Tobago, Miami (lol), Saint Lucia, Dominca, US Virgin Islands, and other Anglosphere Antilles. The rest is Latinoamerica, including Puerto Rico (US) and Brazil (Portuguese ancestry).

          Fun fact: there is a considerable portion of Latinoamerica that refuses to call people from the USA “Americans”, and instead call them United Statians (Estado Unidenses) or North Americans (Norteamericanos). This is because they see everyone from the Americas as Americans, so calling people from the US Americans kind of implies that everyone else isn’t American. This trend is more common in Latin American countries that have had an antagonized relationship with the US, especially in the 1900s during the Kissinger years.

          Funner fact: In general, French Guiana and Haiti get grouped in with Latinoamerica, but not Quebec or Louisiana. I don’t know about Martinique and Guadeloupe, but my guess is that they would.

          Funnest fact: Lots of people in Cuba don’t even use United Statesians or North Americans as identifiers. Instead, they call Americans “Yuma” after an American movie called 3:10 to Yuma where the part of the plot was to reach Yuma, AZ.

    • Donkter@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      ALL AMERICA IS FREE AMERICA. IF IT AINT FREE, IT AINT ME. 🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🍔🍔🍔

  • njm1314@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Central America is not a continent. It’s a region of North America. This is ridiculous claim.

    • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      2 months ago

      That map says that New Zealand is part of the continent of Australia, which it is not. New Zealand is on a submerged continent called Zealandia

      • FireTower@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Continent are fairly subjective. Some favor strictly connected lands (joining Eurasia). Others do it by the tectonic plates. Other by culture barriers drawing a line between Europe and Asia.

        For the purposes of the post I simply meant to convey that the NA v SA distinction is widely accepted to be at the thinnest point between them. Which would include Central America w/ NA.

        • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          2 months ago

          Right, but on an article clarifying the often misunderstood continental boundaries, I thought it might be helpful to point out that map was creating more of that confusion in a different area, whilst clarifying it for another

          • mods_mum@lemmy.today
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            2 months ago

            To me adding Zealandia as a separate continent would just add to confusion. Especially that the community is still divided on classifying it as a continent or not.

      • DMBFFF@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        wp:Zealandia

        Zealandia (pronounced /ziːˈlændiə/), also known as Te Riu-a-Māui (Māori)[2] or Tasmantis (from Tasman Sea),[3][4] is an almost entirely submerged mass of continental crust in Oceania that subsided after breaking away from Gondwana 83–79 million years ago.[5] It has been described variously as a submerged continent, continental fragment, and microcontinent.[6] The name and concept for Zealandia was proposed by Bruce Luyendyk in 1995,[7] and satellite imagery shows it to be almost the size of Australia.[8] A 2021 study suggests Zealandia is over a billion years old, about twice as old as geologists previously thought.[9][10]

    • njm1314@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I blame that crack.com article that came out like 15 or 20 years ago or whatever it was. One of the worst and most poorly research articles I’ve ever read and yet it’s spawned a legion of terrible responses.

  • AA5B@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    I’m most fascinated by the route map: it explains why he never set for on the continent. He took the long way. I suppose there was no reason to expect a great circle route but that so engrained that I couldnt picture him getting to the Caribbean without going down the east coast

    Especially if you consider Columbus’ voyages together with Eric the Red, a great circle route just seems automatic

    Put that together with safe flying rules where you don’t want to go too far from land, depending on your plane, so naturally follow the coast, then cross the ocean where it’s narrower and there are places to land. Why wouldn’t an old sailing ship also want to stay near land?