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Hunted Facts on continents
- Africa is the second largest continent of the world and has about 770 million people.
- The continent is recognized as the birthplace of the Homo Sapiens and of historical civilizations.
- The northern part of the continent is dominated by the Sahara desert, the largest desert in the world.
- The continents, in order of size, are Eurasia (conventionally regarded as the two continents of Europe, individually the second smallest, and Asia), Africa, North America, South America, Antarctica, and Australia.
- In geology, continents are defined in terms of the earth's crustal structure and constituency, rather than land-surface areas.
- The study of the history and origins of continental drift is called plate tectonics because, in charting the directions that the continents have taken, geologists discovered that the earth's crust and upper mantle are divided into a number of semirigid plates, each of which has recognizable boundaries and moves as a unit.
- Continents are sometimes subdivided into subcontinents that are delineated by geological features: the prototype of this is the Indian subcontinent.
- Continents are portions of the Earth's crust characterized by a stable platform of Precambrian metamorphic and igneous rock (typically 1.5 to 3.8 billion years old) largely of granitic composition, called the craton, and a central "shield" where the craton is exposed at the surface.
- The margins of the continents are characterized by currently-active or relatively recently active mobile belts and/or deep troughs of accumulated marine or deltaic sediments.
- The continents, in order of size, are Eurasia (conventionally regarded as the two continents of Europe, individually the second smallest, and Asia), Africa, North America, South America, Antarctica, and Australia.
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