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List of Continents

What are continents?

The Earth's land masses are divided into 7 large landmasses called continents.  They are generally identified by convention rather than any strict criteria, with seven regions commonly regarded as continents.
 

Continents are large, continuous, discrete masses of land, ideally separated by expanses of water."  Many of the seven most commonly recognized continents identified by convention are not discrete landmasses separated by water. The criterion 'large' leads to arbitrary classification: Greenland, with a surface area of 2,166,086 square kilometers (836,330 sq mi) is considered the world's largest island, while Australia, at 7,617,930 square kilometers (2,941,300 sq mi) is deemed to be a continent.

Likewise, the ideal criterion that each be a continuous landmass is often disregarded by the inclusion of the continental shelf and oceanic islands, and contradicted by classifying North and South America as one continent; and/or Asia, Europe and Africa as one continent, with no natural separation by water.

This anomaly reaches its extreme if the continuous land mass of Europe and Asia is considered to constitute two continents. The Earth's major landmasses are washed upon by a single, continuous World Ocean, which is divided into a number of principal oceanic components by the continents and various geographic criteria.

There are also a group of islands in the Pacific ocean which geographers refer to as Oceania. (Oceania is not a continent.)  Continents constitute about one-third of the earth's surface.  There are seven continents on Earth: