cratons

We can trace cratons back to there origin, map megafloods and trace the path of tectonic plates through time.

Today's tectonic plates are cored by ancient cratons, the oldest and most tectonically stable pieces of crust.

Other fun bits: mostly found in cratons; mostly from 70 and 150 Mya, but some >1200 Mya.

The list of cratons on Wikipedia includes entries for Antarctica and Australia while omitting Greenland.

Around these cratons are progressively younger strips of crust stuck on by colliding island arcs.

My main contribution included the random generation and movement of the cratons.

There are areas we call 'shields' that are over 3 billion years old and are the original cratons that seeded continent formation.

We wrote an in-house editor that let us create and animate the different cratons, starting with the Pangaea configuration (basically all cratons stuck together as a giant continent) all the way through to how they are arranged now, to simulate how they moved historically.

Some of the definitions are complicated by the fact that continents join and break up, and their continuity across multiple continental cycles is not a given -- but that of cratons is, which are sort of an inner core of really old rocks that managed to survive all sorts of tectonic abuse.

All of today's "classical" continents are amalgamations of contiguous continental crust around one or more neighboring cratons.

If you say "land surrounded by water," then it's the EurAsiaAfrican landmass, if you look at geology (of which I am no expert), then you have a lot more nit-picky defintions such as continents, cratons, crusts, rifts, etc.

Cratons don't get subducted, that's a common misconception.