Why are Aphrodite Terra and Ishtar Terra on Venus referred to as conitinents?
Because they basically are. Within limits, if there were oceans on Venus, they would be landmasses. They are large, raised areas of the surface. However, it’s a little controversial to call them continents because Venus has no continental drift. It has tectonic activity, that is, the surface does move around, but only on a scale of ten km or so rather than in plates thousands of km across as on Earth, so although Ishtar and Aphrodite are plateaux they aren’t really continents. If Venus had oceans and it didn’t change its geology, they’d be eroded away in a few million years because they’re not being renewed by tectonic activity like our continents are.
