Europe is just a peninsula with peninsulas and even more peninsulas

This is gonna get weird...

I’m gonna write the weirdest thing I’ve ever written. Like this is almost conspiracy-level stuff. But it’s also geography so the conspiracy is harmless at best. I almost didn’t write it at all though. I was going to write about something more boring because I didn’t think this would land (it was about Antarctica’s weird pie borders… yawn!). But in staying true with what “Free Thought Fridays” are all about, I owe it to you all to just get it out there. Mostly because I can’t stop thinking about it. So, bear with me a bit and we’ll go down a particularly weird geographic rabbit hole… together.

Okay, so there’s a constant debate that rages in geographic circles online around Europe. Not about which country is best. Or about why Germany is so wealthy, or France so cultured, or Italy so… whatever. Those questions are asked of course, constantly, but the real question at the heart of this article focuses on the entire region of Europe. It’s focuses on what Europe is specifically.

Now, I’ve never weighed in personally because my real geographic opinion is that geographically, continents don’t matter. I have written about how many continents we have, but that’s a bit beyond the scope here. At the end of the day I don’t see much difference if there’s a North America and a South America or just an America, at least not geographically or politically. Continents don’t have central governments or sovereignty. They’re just place names. Geologically, of course, there’s a pretty sound argument because many of these places sit on different tectonic plates, but if we used that as our metric, we'd have lot more continents.