Re: Continental Borders

From: Daryl Krupa (icycalmca_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 12/20/04 

Date: 19 Dec 2004 22:11:28 -0800

george wrote:
> "Daryl Krupa" <icycalmca@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> news:1103356466.276097.240560@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
<snip>
> >> >> Iceland is Europe.
<knip>
> Daryl, that is a national/political designation. The fact of the
matter is that
> the Mid-Atlantic ridge separates the American crustal plate from the
European
> crustal plate. One place where this occurs is right down the middle
of Iceland.
> Tectonically speaking, Iceland is made up of parts of both plates.

Actually those are the North American and Eurasian plates.
There is no "American" plate _per se_.

Iceland is on the boundary of those two plates, yes, but it is
surrounded by
oceanic crust, and is not attached to any mass of
continental crust.
Iceland was formed by a hot spot over a mantle plume that happened to
be
directly underneath a mid-ocean spreading centre.

These fugures might help to visualise Iceland's physical separation
from the continental
parts of the North American and Eurasian plates:

http://www.geo.uni-bremen.de/FB5/Ozeankruste/hotspots.jpg

http://www.soc.soton.ac.uk/CHD/classroom@sea/carlsberg/images/atlantic_tectonics%20.jpg

http://www.soc.soton.ac.uk/CHD/classroom@sea/carlsberg/images/atlantic_tectonics%20.jpg

Tectonically speaking, Iceland is a part of neither continent, so
a national/political designation is the best one can hope for, if one
is to define
the boundaries of continents.

The original questioner did not give a definition of "continent", but
if Iceland is to be
placed inside the3 boundaries of either the North American or the
European continent,
it is to be placed in Europe.
That is all that I was meaning to imply.

Daryl Krupa

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