Continent of Australia

Map for The Continent of Australia

About Continent of Australia

The smallest continent Australia with various islands in the Pacific Ocean is called Oceania, consists of 14 UN member countries with two other countries associated with New Zealand and 26 non-sovereign territories that has 8,600,000 square kilometers of land, 36,000,000 inhabitants and the density is 4.2/square kilometer. The lowest lying continent has 2.5 million square kilometers of land connected with the islands including the Sahul Shelf and Bass Strait, less than 50 meters deep which is known as an island continent surrounded by the Oceans. There are fourteen UN member countries with two non-UN member countries and twenty six non sovereign territories.

United Nations member states: Australia, Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Nauru, New Zealand, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu.

Non-United Nations member states: Cook Islands and Niue.

Non-sovereign territories: American Samoa, Ashmore and Cartier Islands, Baker Island, Clipperton Island, Coral Sea Islands, Easter Island, French Polynesia, Guam, Hawaii, Howland Island, Jarvis Island, Johnston Atoll, Juan Fernández Islands, Kingman Reef, Midway Islands, New Caledonia, Norfolk Island, Northern Mariana Islands, Ogasawara Village, Palmyra Atoll, Papua, Pitcairn Islands, Tokelau, Wake Island, Wallis and Futuna, West Papua.

For its central location on tectonic plate, the continent Australia has no active volcanic regions. About 96 million years ago, Australianea (Australia-New Guinea) on the Indo-Australian Plate began to rise north which was joined with Antarctica to the southern supercontinent, Gondwana. In about 10,000 BC, ending of the glacial period, Tasmania was separated from the mainland Australia when rising sea levels formed Bass Strait. In between about 8000-6500 BC, when the northern lowlands were flooded by the sea New Guinea, the Aru Islands and the Australian mainland were separated.

Oceanic climates have warm in summers and cool in winters where can have much stormy and the range of temperatures is smaller than typical climates through the continent which is not so warm and not very cool. In some places have more than one month cooler than 18 °C and calls it “subtropical highland climate” which is marked winter drought. Agriculture is favorable for both in oceanic climates and subtropical highland climate.