Earth's land is usually divided into seven continents: Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Antarctica, Europe and Australia. A continent is one of the large main divisions of land on Earth, but continents are defined by convention rather than by a strict rule, so people count them in different ways; the seven-continent model is the one most commonly taught in countries such as the United States. Some people count only six continents by joining North America and South America into one called America, while another six-continent model, mostly used in Russia, Eastern Europe and Japan, joins Europe and Asia into one called Eurasia. The Olympic five-continent model leaves out Antarctica because it is uninhabited; the United Nations groups the world into five regions rather than seven continents: Asia, Africa, Europe (which includes Russia), the Americas and Oceania. Geographers classify Australia as a continent because it sits on its own continental crust and is surrounded by the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Together the seven pieces add up to about 148 million square kilometers of land, which is most, but not all, of Earth's land surface.

Asia covers about 44.6 million square kilometers, almost a third of the world's land, and Africa is the second-largest, covering more than three times the area of the United States. Europe holds just 7 percent of the world's land. Australia, the smallest continent, covers just under 8.5 million square kilometers, yet the country of Australia has a total area of 7,688,287 square kilometers and is the world's sixth-largest country. As of November 2026, about 4.86 billion people live in Asia, around 58.6 percent of the world's people, and about 1.58 billion live in Africa, around 19.1 percent. As of November 2026, about 1.06 billion live in the Americas, 743 million in Europe and 47 million in Oceania. As of November 2026, Africa has 56 countries but only 18.3 percent of the world's people, according to National Geographic.

The tallest ground on Earth is also a lesson in measurement. The Survey of India gave Mount Everest about 8,848 meters in 1954, a National Geographic GPS team gave 8,850 meters in 1999, and a Chinese team gave 8,844.43 meters in 2005, a figure that left out the snow cap; a Nepali team of surveyors reached the top of Everest in May 2019, and a Chinese team measured it in 2020. As of November 2026, the official height is 8,848.86 meters, or 29,031.7 feet, announced jointly by Nepal and China in December 2020. Asia holds much of the world's high and deep places. The Tibetan Plateau averages more than 4,500 meters above sea level, and approximately 2 billion people depend on the rivers fed by its glaciers; the Bay of Bengal, covering almost 2.2 million square kilometers, is the largest bay in the world. As of November 2026, the depth of Lake Baikal in southern Russia is given as 1,642 meters, or 5,387 feet, making it the deepest lake in the world.

Africa's Sahara is the largest hot desert on Earth, but how large depends on how its edges are drawn: sources give its area as anywhere from 8.5 million to 9.4 million square kilometers. It makes up about 25 percent of Africa. Dunes, called ergs, cover only 20 percent of it, while gravel plains called regs cover 70 percent. Only a small part of the world's deserts is the endless dunes people imagine, because desert is defined by little rain, not by sand. The Nile is the second argument in Africa. It flows over 6,800 kilometers before it empties into the Mediterranean Sea, and it threads its way through 11 African countries; some researchers have contested the Nile's status as the world's longest river and credit the Amazon instead. Lake Victoria, the largest lake in Africa, is the southern source of the Nile, and the Blue Nile flows from Lake Tana in Ethiopia.

Kilimanjaro is a triple volcano with three peaks, and NASA calls it the tallest free-standing mountain at 5,895 meters; it is high enough to keep a permanent snow cap even though it lies close to the equator. The Great Rift Valley is a site of major tectonic activity, where the continent of Africa is splitting into two. Central-eastern Africa is important to scientists who study evolution and the earliest origins of humanity, and it is thought to be where hominins began to evolve. Europe extends from the island nation of Iceland in the west to the Ural Mountains of Russia in the east. Europe's highest peak, Mount Elbrus at 5,642 meters, is in the Caucasus Mountains of Russia. The Volga River drains Europe's largest watershed, about 1.38 million square kilometers.

North America runs from ice to islands. The Rockies, North America's largest mountain chain, stretch from British Columbia, Canada, to the U.S. state of New Mexico; as of November 2026, the U.S. Geological Survey measurement of Denali, made in 2015, is 6,190 meters, making it the continent's highest peak. The Mississippi River is 3,730 kilometers long, one of the longest river systems in the world; the ice age that covered much of North America reached its peak about 18,000 years ago, while the Cascade Range is young: some of its peaks began to form only about one million years ago. South America has the Andes and the Amazon. Aconcagua, the highest peak in the Andes, stands at 6,962 meters, and the Andes cover about 8,850 kilometers. More water flows from the Amazon than from the next six largest rivers combined. NASA says the Amazon basin spans at least 6 million square kilometers, nearly twice the size of India, while National Geographic gives almost 7 million; the Amazon rainforest is home to one-fifth of the world's land species, many found nowhere else.

Antarctica is the windiest, driest and iciest place on Earth. Its ice sheet covers almost 14 million square kilometers and contains about 30 million cubic kilometers of ice, enough that if all of it melted, sea level would rise about 58 meters. Together the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets contain more than 99 percent of the land ice and over 68 percent of the fresh water on Earth. As of November 2026, the lowest air temperature ever measured on Earth is -89.2 degrees Celsius, at Vostok Station on 21 July 1983; the coldest place on Earth is on the East Antarctic Plateau, but not at the highest peak. Captain Cook became the first recorded European navigator to cross the Antarctic Circle in January 1773, and Bellingshausen reported seeing an ice shore of extreme height in the last week of January 1820. Borchgrevink's 1899 expedition was the first to spend a winter on the Antarctic mainland, and Roald Amundsen was the first person to reach the South Pole, in December 1911. The Antarctic Treaty was signed in Washington on 1 December 1959 by twelve countries, and it says Antarctica shall be used for peaceful purposes.

Australia is the flattest continent and the second-driest, after Antarctica, and mainland Australia is known for the Outback, a desert area in the interior. The Great Dividing Range, a long mountain range, rises near its east coast; the Great Barrier Reef off Queensland is approximately 2,300 kilometers long. In February 2017 a research team led by New Zealand's geoscience agency GNS Science proposed that Zealandia, a 4.9 million square kilometer region of the southwest Pacific Ocean, is a continent. The team argued that its isolation from Australia and its large area support defining it as a continent, and roughly 94 percent of it is underwater. Zealandia once made up approximately 5 percent of the area of the supercontinent Gondwana. Scientists theorize that continental material built up along the boundaries of tectonic plates through a process called subduction.

The map is also a snapshot of motion. According to the Library of Congress, the first suggestion that the continents appeared to fit together was made by the cartographer Abraham Ortelius. Alfred Wegener proposed continental drift in the early 1900s, with three articles published in 1912, and it took several more decades for most scientists to accept it. By 240 million years ago almost all of the world's land was joined in a single huge continent, and by about 200 million years ago it began to break apart. North America and Europe are now moving away from each other at about 2.5 centimeters per year. The big supercontinent was called Pangaea. The plates rest on the hot, molten rock of Earth's mantle. Any map of the seven continents is a picture taken at one moment.

Words to know

• convention: agreed habit
• subduction: sinking plate edge
• ergs: sand seas
• hominins: early humans
• Zealandia: proposed continent