Geotrivia - February 2021: multi-continent countries

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Hi everyone,

last Friday (26th of Feb) we ran another twitter-based geo trivia contest. Everyone can join in, we do it every month, the only purpose is to have a bit of fun as the month winds down.

February’s geotrivia question:

“Name countries that have territory on multiple continents”

You might be surprised to learn that reverse geocoding to determine which continent a point lies in comes up surprisingly often, which is why our geocoding API returns a continent value in the components portion of each geocoding result. Specifically we supply one of the following values: Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Europe, Oceania, North America, South America.

Some parts of the world are a bit up for debate, for example is the Caribbean part of North America or South America, or should it be its own “continent”. In other cases we have territories which geologically perhaps belong to one continent but culturally and historically are part of another. A good example is the island of Madeira which is off the coast of Africa, but politically and culturally has always been part of Portugal and thus European.

Still, there are many countries with territories that span multiple continents. Some cases are obvious, like Russia which stretches from Europe to Asia. But in some cases the list is quite surprising, for example Norway which owns Bouvet Island near Antartica.

Here’s the #fridaygeotrivia twitter thread, click through to see the discussion:

ok kids, in about 5 minutes we'll kick off some #fridaygeotrivia we'll use this tweet to start a thread

— OpenCage Geocoder (@OpenCage) February 26, 2021

Big thanks to everyone who played along!

The geotrivia answer:

Show / hide answer

Happy geocoding,

Ed