landmasses modulo countries

This is a goofy little post I wrote up in May 2024. At the time, I was using an app called StudyGe to try to memorize the name and location of every country (which I did, successfully, though I'm not sure I can repeat the feat). The thing about that app is it counts a bunch of territories as their own things along with the regular UN-recognized nations, but it's annoyingly kind of arbitrary. For example, it counts Curaçao (a Dutch Carribean island) but not Christmas Island (Australian), which slightly annoyed me when Christmas Island came up on the Tradle.

Somewhere in that process I got interested in counting landmasses, subject to the rule that if two different landmasses share the same country, they should be counted as the same landmass.

In other words, we start with the continents and all islands, and glue two of them together if there's a country that's on both. This ends up giving a great puzzle, which I gave to a friend: if you discard all the single-nation landmasses, how many landmasses do you get under this rule (the "main ones" below)?

I also learned about the existence of micronations. I think I may have done a iffy job deciding which ones to count, but they're hilarious and just about every single one has an interesting story.

Anyway, here's the full unedited original text below. Let me know if you would like to suggest edits to the count.

ok wow I guess I spent an hour on this but the answer is somewhere around 50:

main ones (5)

micronations (8, but really could be more or less):

countries with no land borders, from wikipedia (39): (note that territories + constituent countries like christmas island, jersey, aruba, etc are counted as part of the country claiming them. you'd get a lot more with the british overseas territories and all the other stuff in the carribean)

I'm also pretty sure there's a few little islands I missed but whatever