Maritime Continent of which contribute to the development of the Tropical Warm Pool, which is the warmest large area of ocean on Earth. Coined by Colin Ramage in 1968, the name combines the terms "maritime" and "continent" normally used as opposites in the description of climate. Maritime air is humid, and continental air is dry. In the Southeast Asia region, land masses and bodies of water are, roughly-speaking, evenly distributed. Moreover, the land masses are characterized by high mountains, and the seas are among the warmest on the earth. This produces a widespread area of diurnal thunderstorms which pump huge quantities of
Continent as "New Holland, an immense island, which some geographers dignify with the appellation of another continent" and the "Oxford English Dictionary" was just as equivocal some decades later. Antarctica was sighted in 1820 during the First Russian Antarctic Expedition and described as a continent by Charles Wilkes on the United States Exploring Expedition in 1838, the last continent identified, although a great "Antarctic" (antipodean) landmass had been anticipated for millennia. An 1849 atlas labelled Antarctica as a continent but few atlases did so until after World War II. From the mid-19th century, atlases published in the United States more commonly