Name: What If We Made A New Continent?
Uploaded: 2018-02-06T04:55:26.000Z
Duration: 4 min 16 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

What if you could create a new, maybe even better continent?

Cambridge Dictionary defines a continent as “one of the seven large land masses on the

Earth's surface, surrounded or mainly surrounded by sea.”

Generally, most people are taught that there are 7 continents - Europe, Asia, Africa, Antarctica,

North America, South America and Australia.

Not all cultures agree on what defines a continent.

And surprisingly, scientists don't either.

Even NASA says that there's no single, agreed upon, scientific classification for what makes

There's no set square milage, no required population, nothing.

With the definition of a continent being super murky, building a hypothetical landmass and

getting it classified as a continent could be a struggle and may eventually come down

to convincing governing geographical bodies and society.

If Greenland, at almost 1 million sq miles, isn't a continent, your landmass would probably

But what about actually constructing this continent?

First things first, you would need to find a spot to build in international waters, meaning

that part of the world is not claimed by anyone else.

You'd need to be at least 200 miles from any existing country's territorial sea baseline,

It should come as no surprise that you'd want to pick a fairly shallow spot since you'd

Once you found your spot, you'd need materials and a ship ton of money.

The project to build the World Islands in Dubai required over $25 billion before the

And those islands only total 20 square miles and are right on the shallow shoreline!

In the middle of the ocean, with more square milage, your hypothetical continent would

Using those rates, it'd cost quadrillions and quadrillions of dollars.

You'd need to start construction by creating the base of your landmass, piling sand directly

This sand could either be brought in on a ship or you could use a sea dredging ship

to dig up sand from the sea floor and reuse that.

Then a super thick layer of rocks would be laid on top of that sand.

And finally, cement would be added to top it all off.

Now the real battle to become more than just a measly island begins; getting it recognized

as a continent with geographers, the scientific community and the public.

With such a vague definition, this part may be tough but having a large landmass that

stands out from other continents should help your case.

While humans haven't yet built their own continent, they have created artificial islands,

like Dubai's World Islands and Palm Islands.[16] Another amazing human feat is

the island of Flevopolder in  the Netherlands.

It was created by sectioning off an area of a bay and draining the water out over the

course of decades, revealing open land to build on.

Small artificial islands are nothing new.

They're created all over for uses like military bases, airports and even bird sanctuaries.

But they're often built in shallow water already owned by a territory, which is what

Building your own continent sounds insanely expensive, very labor intensive and could

start a huge cultural debate, but we believe in you.

We'd support your hypothetical continent.

What part of the world would you want to build your continent?