At a distance of 1,600 mi (2,575 km), Africa and South America are relatively close trans-Atlantic neighbors.
In fact, the distance from SW Senegal to NE Brazil is less than half the distance between London and New York.
Travelmath helps you find distances based on actual road trip directions, or the straight line flight distance. You can get the distance between cities, airports, states, countries, or zip codes to figure out the best route to travel to your destination. Compare the results to the straight line distance to determine whether it's better to drive or fly. The database uses the latitude and longitude of each location to calculate distance using the great circle distance formula. The calculation is done using the Vincenty algorithm and the WGS84 ellipsoid model of the Earth, which is the same one used by most GPS receivers. This gives you the flying distance "as the crow flies." Find your flight distances quickly to estimate the number of frequent flyer miles you'll accumulate. Or ask how far is it between cities to solve your homework problems.
How The Internet Travels Across Oceans
Undersea Cable Connectivity
Surprisingly, as of mid-2011, only a single undersea fibre-optic cable connects the two continents.
Atlantis-2, activated in 1999, has landing points in Argentina, Brazil, Cape Verde, Senegal, Spain, and Portugal.
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In the meantime, the 20 Gbit/s capacity provided by Atlantis-2 has been substantial.
Planned for mid-2013 was the SAex cable which would connect Fortaleza to South Africa.
A second “trunk” would run from South Africa to Nigeria with landing points in Gabon, DRC, and Angola.
When complete, the new cable would provide the shortest route to the USA, thus reducing network latency.
Until now, most SA Internet traffic has been routed via Europe, and then across the North Atlantic to New York.
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Capacity is key. Also worth watching is India.
Currently, India and Africa are directly connected by SEACOM and SAFE cables.
However, additional capacity will soon be needed along the southern and eastern coasts.
Continental Boundaries: A Matter of Convention
Determining the boundaries between the continents is generally a matter of geographical convention and consensus.
Several slightly different conventions are in use.
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The number of continents is most commonly considered seven (in English-speaking countries) but may range as low as four when Afro-Eurasia and the Americas are both considered as single continents.
An island can be considered to be associated with a given continent by either lying on the continent's adjacent continental shelf (e.g. Singapore, the British Isles) or being a part of a microcontinent on the same principal tectonic plate (e.g. Madagascar and Seychelles).
An island can also be entirely oceanic while still being associated with a continent by geology (e.g. Bermuda, the Australian Indian Ocean Territories) or by common geopolitical convention (e.g. Ascension Island, the South Sandwich Islands).
While today the isthmus between Asia and Africa is navigable via the Suez Canal, and that between North and South America via the Panama Canal, these artificial channels are not generally accepted as continent-defining boundaries in themselves.
The Suez Canal happens to traverse the Isthmus of Suez between the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea, dividing Africa and Asia.
Historically in Greco-Roman geography, "Africa" meant Ancient Libya, and its eastern extent was taken to be around Marmarica, at the Catabathmus Magnus.
This was not considered to be a continent.
As wider knowledge of geography developed, the shape of the African landmass (and Egypt's "natural" inclusion in that landmass) became apparent.
In 1806, William George Browne still titled his travelogue Travels in Africa, Egypt, and Syria.
Similarly, James Bruce in 1835 published Travels through part of Africa, Syria, Egypt, and Arabia.
The usual line taken to divide Africa from Asia today is at the Isthmus of Suez, the narrowest gap between the Mediterranean Sea and the Gulf of Suez, the route today followed by the Suez Canal.
This makes the Sinai Peninsula geographically Asian, and Egypt a transcontinental country.
Less than 2% of the Egyptian population live on the Sinai Peninsula, and hence Egypt, even though technically transcontinental, is usually considered an African country entirely and not partly Asian.
But when discussing the geopolitical region of the Middle East and North Africa, Egypt is usually grouped with the Western Asian countries as part of the Middle East, while Egypt's western neighbor Libya is grouped with the remaining North African countries as the Maghreb.
Both are members of the African Union.
The Portuguese Atlantic island possession of the Azores is 1,368 km (850 mi) from Europe and 1,507 km (936 mi) from Africa, and is sometimes grouped with Europe.
The Mediterranean island country of Malta is about 81 km (50 mi) from the coast of Sicily - much closer than the 288 km (179 mi) distance to the African mainland.
The nearby Italian island of Lampedusa (principal island of the Pelagie Islands) is 207 km (129 mi) from Sicily while just 127 km (79 mi) from the African mainland; similarly, Pantelleria is 100 km (62 mi) from Sicily and just 71 km (44 mi) from the African mainland.
There are six definitive occurrences of territories unequivocally being a part of the African continent, but legally being administered by a European state.
Three of these are administered by France, and the other three by Spain.
The existence of these territories further blurs the line between the borders of Africa and Europe, in particular with regard to the Spanish territories which lie immediately adjacent to and/or connected to the African mainland.
The uninhabited Spanish unincorporated overseas minor territories, known as the plazas de soberanía ("Localities of Sovereignty"), are small islands that lie immediately adjacent to the North African coastline, with the exception of Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera, which was originally an island like the other 'localities' but has subsequently become directly connected to the Moroccan (African) mainland.
Two of the French territories are the inhabited overseas departments and regions of Mayotte and Réunion.
Mayotte is an island territory located west of the island country of Madagascar within the Mozambique Channel.
Réunion is an island territory located near the island country of Mauritius and to the east of Madagascar (both nominally considered part of the African continent).
The final territory is the Scattered Islands in the Indian Ocean, administratively a part of the French Southern and Antarctic Lands.
Antarctica along with its outlying islands have no permanent population.
Australia's Heard Island and McDonald Islands (an external territory) and the French Kerguelen Islands are located on the Kerguelen Plateau, on the Antarctic continental plate.
Both are still within the bounds of the Indian Ocean.
The United Nations categorizes Heard Island and McDonald Islands, which are politically affiliated with Australia, as being part of Oceania.
The islands are 4,000 km from Perth in Australia, and have never been inhabited by indigenous peoples of Oceania or any other humans.
The French Crozet Islands, Île Amsterdam, Île Saint-Paul, and the Norwegian Bouvet Island are also located on the Antarctic continental plate, and are not often associated with other continents.
South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands are closer to Antarctica than to any other continent.
However, they are politically associated with the Falkland Islands, which are less geographically isolated from South America.
Furthermore, Argentina, a South American country, maintains its irredentist claims on all of these islands, which are administered by the United Kingdom.
The United Nations consider them to be part of South America.
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