Why are Europe and Australia considered continents while Greenland

>>35160696
Greenland has like 10,000 people maximum. Who even gives a shit what happens to that shitty ice wasteland

Greenland is actually no where near the size of Australia. It's impossible to accurately describe a globe in a two dimensional image. Most map projects overstate the size of things at the poles. In fact Greenland covers 836,330 square miles and is part of the nation of Denmark. By comparison, Australia covers 2,969,907 square miles.

The distinction between Europe and Asia isn't a physical one. It's only a cultural and historic one.

>>35160696

The very facts that you have asserted, OP, are in point of actual fact, a matter of contention among geographers. You can readily find geographers who will instead insist, for certain purposes, on Eurasia. Meanwhile, for others, Australia is, rather than being a continent, the largest island. The seven-continent model has plenty of learned objectors.

A big part of all of this, however, is of course culture and the history of human migration. Europe is a particular, relevant place where a lot of history was won, and it's a good ways away from most of the rest of that fuckhuge thing called Asia, so naturally as Europeans put taxonomy on the world, they thought of themselves as an equal geographic place to the rest of these places. Hence also the traditional Europe-top-center world maps.

What happened in Greenland, ever? A handful of vikings visited a millenium ago, and some eskimos came to live. A continent is thus, forgive the undergrad-phrase, to some extent "socially constructed", as a large, culturally relevant patch of land, rather than being merely a patch of land-except when the obviousness and bigness of the thing is such that it cannot be denied, e.g. Antarctica.

>>35160882

I know that the number isn't important here, that you were only making a point about scale, but still, it's off by a good bit: greenland has a little over 50,000 people. I know it's not the point that you were making, but it's literally wrong and I can't let it go, especially when you underlined with "maximum".