Bermuda is not in the Americas at all. Look at a topographical map of the ocean floor. The Americas and the Old World have been (and continue to be) driven apart by a line of volcanism stretching North to South on the floor of the Atlantic. This same process created the Atlantic Ocean, and continues to widen it. The volcanic material that wells up solidifies, creating an ever widening ocean floor...the materiel has welled up at varying rates. When it has welled up too quickly, it has not simply created a flat floor, but has built up mountains. The mid-Atlantic ridge is the sub-oceanic mountain ridge that currently stretches down the length of the fissure. The important detail is that all parts of the Oceanic plate under the Atlantic floor were formed at that fissure, and this includes the seamount that forms Bermuda....a very long time ago, when the Atlantic was far narrower, Bermuda was the mid-Atlantic ridge. There are a number of other oceanic islands in the Atlantic formed by the same process, and these are the only other landmasses that Bermuda can truthfully be described as composing a common geographical unit with.

Cartographers, civil servants and the generally ignorant, however, find it easier to group by proximity, or by the imagined cultural or racial commonality of separate populations.

Consequently, Bermuda, settled politically as an extension of Virginia, and nearest to Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, is typically described as being part of North America.

At other times it is described as being part of the Caribbean or the West Indies. The latter term covers a larger area than the Caribbean, allowing the inclusion of the Gulf of Mexico and islands like the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos. Bermuda, a thousand miles from the Caribbean, and nearer to Halifax, Nova Scotia than to Miami, Florida, is obviously not part of either geographic area. As it is an island with a Spanish name, in the vague area of the New World, and is often presumed by non-Bermudians to have an overwhelmingly African racial makeup and culture (as is also assumed for the West Indies), and to have identical climate, society, and culture to the West Indies (none of which is true), it is often erroneously grouped with the West Indies. As some organisations prefer to group the West Indies with Central America, Bermuda can be found listed as part of Central America.

The islands stretching down the East side of the Caribbean were once hilltops on an isthmus that joined North and South America, before vulcanism created the current isthmus of Central America. For a geological time period, the two continents were isolated, with no land bridge. The shallow sea between, the Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico, and the near shore Atlantic, are all over the continental shelf. That is to say that the islands of the Caribbean/West Indies, unlike Bermuda, are part of the same continental landmass as the Americas, and are not oceanic islands formed by the same processes as Bermuda.