Ask a class in London how many continents there are and the answer is seven. Ask the same question in Madrid or Mexico City and you will likely hear six, with one America. In Moscow it is six again, but a different six, with one Eurasia. Nobody in these classrooms is wrong. They learned different conventions.
That is the starting point of this story. Continents feel like physical facts, but the coastlines never change between these answers. What changes is which pieces of land we decide to count as one thing. I took the continent models listed on Wikipedia (Wikipedia contributors, 2026b) and built them as a layer in GeoCanvas. The land comes from the Natural Earth countries at 1:50m (Natural Earth, n.d.), which sorts whole countries into continents. I adapted it by cutting the landmass where a continental boundary runs through a country, more on that in section 4, and then grouped the pieces into each model.
1. What makes a continent
The everyday definition asks for large, continuous landmasses, ideally separated by water. Apply it strictly and it breaks at once. Europe and Asia share one landmass with no sea between them, Africa is attached to Asia at Suez, and the two Americas meet at Panama. The historical geographer Martin W. Lewis argues that the system is rooted more in social, political and cultural history than in geological fact. The split puts Europe on the same level as all of Asia, although in physical, cultural and historical diversity China or India alone compare to Europe as a whole (Wikipedia contributors, 2026b).
Geologists use a different test. A continent is crust that is thicker, lighter and richer in silica than the ocean floor, standing higher than its surroundings, with clear limits and a large area. By that test there is at least one continent that no school map shows. Zealandia covers about 4.9 million km² of the southwest Pacific, and 94% of it lies under water (Mortimer et al., 2017). New Zealand and New Caledonia are the parts that stick out. So the physical definition and the one we learn at school do not even agree on what they are counting.
2. Seven is younger than it looks
The seven continent model is not old. America entered the maps as one continent, named by Waldseemüller in 1507 (Wikipedia contributors, 2026b), and it stayed one for a long time. Most geographers in the United States only started splitting North and South America in the 1950s, around the same time Australia replaced Oceania as a continent of its own (Wikipedia contributors, 2026b). The model with one America is the older one of the two.
3. Five models, five maps
Every map below uses the same Equal Earth projection, the same geometry and the same colour ramp. Only the grouping changes. Where each model is taught follows the Wikipedia article and its sources (Wikipedia contributors, 2026b).
Look at how the colours move. Europe is green in the first map, and in the last one that green belongs to the ocean islands, while all of Afro-Eurasia takes over Africa's teal. The ramp hands out colours in the order of the names, so the same land can change colour between two maps. I left it that way on purpose, because it is what you will see when you build this yourself.
4. Where the lines fall
A continent layer has to draw its lines somewhere, and Natural Earth sorts whole countries, not land. It files all of Russia under Europe and all of Egypt under Africa. So the layer cuts a few countries along the boundaries described on Wikipedia (Wikipedia contributors, 2026a). Russia and Kazakhstan are cut at the Urals, the Ural river and the Caspian. Turkey is cut at the Bosporus, and Egypt at Suez. Indonesia is cut at Lydekker's Line, so western New Guinea and the Aru Islands, which geologically belong to the Australian continent, go with Australia.
Some lines are simplified on purpose. The layer keeps Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan whole in Asia, although small parts of Georgia and Azerbaijan lie north of the Greater Caucasus watershed, where most definitions draw the line, and there has never been general agreement on the border in the Caucasus (Wikipedia contributors, 2026a). Cyprus stays in Asia too. The UN statistics standard does the same with Cyprus, while it files all of Russia under Europe (United Nations Statistics Division, n.d.). The UN says its groupings are for statistical convenience, which is a fair description of continents in general.
There is a second kind of line that is easy to miss. Natural Earth gives overseas territories the continent of the country that governs them, so French Guiana, next to Brazil, ends up in Europe. The layer puts land on the continent it is actually on, which moves French Guiana to South America, the Canary Islands to Africa and Hawaii to Oceania. And some islands have no continent at all. Natural Earth leaves the Maldives, Mauritius, the Seychelles and a few others without one, and the layer keeps them as their own group, Ocean islands. None of the five models has a word for them.
5. Build it yourself
Everything above can be rebuilt in GeoCanvas in a few minutes. I used Equal Earth, which is an equal area projection, so the continents can be compared by size.
1Add the Continents layer
Open the Layers tab. Continents is in the Favourites list, press Add. Remove World Countries with its bin icon, so only the continents are left.
2Colour by category
Press the palette icon on the layer row. It opens Symbology in the Edit tab. Under Fill pick By category and set Property to name. The default colours are Set2, which keeps neighbouring continents apart without shouting.
3Add a legend
Go back one level in the Edit tab and open Legend. Switch on Show legend and set the Title to the model, here 7 continents. Naming the model is the whole point, a continent map without it hides its choice.
4Switch the model
Back in the Layers tab, open the Continents card. The model switch is called Detail, the name the app uses for this kind of switch on every catalogue layer. Pick 4 continents.
The colours do not follow on their own. They are tied to the names of the old model, so Afro-Eurasia and America are drawn grey at first. Open Symbology again, press Uniform and then By category, which reads the names the layer has now. Then change the legend title to 4 continents. Repeat this step for every model you want to compare.
6. Which one is right?
None of them, or all of them. Each model answers the same question with a different rule, landmass, tradition or statistics, and each has a place where the rule stops working. A map that shows continents makes one of these choices whether it says so or not. So say it. Put the model in the legend.