kontinentaalinen

Kontinentaalinen is a Finnish adjective meaning “continental.” It is used to describe things relating to continents or to the landmasses of Earth, distinguishing them from marine or insular contexts. In geography and climatology, kontinentaalinen is often applied to describe climates and landscapes typical of inland parts of continents.

In geology, kontinentaalinen kuori refers to the continental crust, the thick, buoyant outer shell that forms the continents. Continental crust is less dense than oceanic crust and has a granitic to granodioritic composition. It is much thicker, averaging about 30 to 50 kilometers, and can be substantially thicker in mountain regions. Much of the continental crust is ancient, containing rocks up to about four billion years old. The crust grows and evolves through processes such as magmatic differentiation, accretion of crustal blocks, and tectonic recycling at plate boundaries.

Continental crust interacts with oceanic crust at various plate boundary settings, giving rise to geological phenomena such as mountain building (orogenies), volcanism, and crustal deformation. The term kontinentaalinen is also used more broadly to differentiate continental-scale features from maritime or island-scale features, for example in descriptions of continental climates, biogeography, or topography.

In summary, kontinentaalinen denotes concepts tied to continents, most notably the continental crust in geology and continental climates or landscapes in geography.