Is Antarctica an island or a continent?

Antarctica is considered both an island—because it is surrounded by water—and a continent.

A continent is one of several very large landmasses. Generally identified by convention rather than any strict criteria, up to seven regions are commonly regarded as continents. Antarctica is one of these.

Ordered from largest in area to smallest, these seven regions are: Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Antarctica, Europe, and Australia. Variations with fewer continents may merge some of these, for example some systems include Eurasia or America as single continents.

Oceanic islands are frequently grouped with a neighbouring continent to divide all the world's land into regions. Under this scheme, for example, most of the island countries and territories in the Pacific Ocean are grouped together with the continent of Australia to form a region called Oceania.

The criterion “large” leads to historical arbitrary classification: Greenland, with a surface area of 2,166,086 square kilometres (836,330 sq mi) is considered the world's largest island, while Australia, at 7,617,930 square kilometres (2,941,300 sq mi) is deemed the smallest continent.