Eventually even the remaining land masses would be destroyed as the direction of offshore winds and the tide forced the coastline ever westwards.

BBC: Spurn Point 'not disappearing'

On most land masses, only the first half-mile has been mined.

WSJ: Exhausting the Earth's Resources? Not So Fast

Mercator's solution remains a boon to sailors to this day, even as it massively distorts the relative sizes of land masses such as Africa and Greenland.

WSJ: Lost in Our Maps: A History of Cartographic Catastrophes

Land masses, and their inhabitants, emit methane without then sucking any of it back up, which makes inverse modelling easier than for carbon dioxide (which has sinks, in the form of photosynthesising plants, as well as sources).

ECONOMIST: Greenhouse-gas monitoring

"There are a lot of secondary impacts of climate change which will make the quality of life in the island Pacific very, very bad, as opposed to, say, very large land masses where people have a lot more freedom to move around, " Koshi says.

NPR: Pacific Island Cultures Brace for Climate Change

Mexico was the main exception: there, in 1810-11, Miguel Hidalgo, a parish priest, raised the Indian masses, and handed out land confiscated from whites.

ECONOMIST: Millennium issue: Freeing Spanish America

Since Israel and the Arab despots share a fear of the Arab masses, the pragmatists claim that Israel should give up all the land it took control over as a payoff to the regimes, who in exchange will sign peace treaties with it.

CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: The pragmatic fantasy