Five, six or seven?
Ask how many continents there are and the answer depends on where you went to school. In Britain, the United States and much of Asia, children learn seven: ASIA, AFRICA, EUROPE, North AMERICA, South America, ANTARCTICA and AUSTRALIA, which is often grouped with the Pacific islands as OCEANIA. In much of Latin America and southern Europe, children learn six, with the Americas counted as one. The five rings of the Olympic flag stand for the five inhabited continents, leaving out Antarctica.
Part of the confusion is that there is no firm rule. Europe and Asia sit on the same vast LANDMASS, and the BORDER between them is only a tradition, usually drawn along the Ural Mountains in Russia and down to the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea. Some geographers call the whole thing Eurasia.
A continent that is mostly underwater
In 2017 a team of geologists argued that there is an eighth continent hiding in the Pacific. Zealandia is a huge slab of continental crust, more than half the size of Australia, lying to its east. About ninety-four per cent of it is underwater; the parts that poke above the waves are New Zealand and New Caledonia. It is made of the same thick, light rock as the other continents rather than the thinner rock of the ocean floor, so some scientists say it deserves the name.
The continents are always on the move, carried along on the plates of the Earth's crust, as our Earth's layers page explains, so today's list is only a snapshot.
The biggest, the smallest and the coldest
Asia is by far the largest continent, covering about a third of the world's land, and it is home to around six out of every ten people on Earth. Australia is the smallest, and the only one that is also a single country. Africa is the only continent that stretches into all four hemispheres, north and south of the EQUATOR and east and west of the line of zero LONGITUDE.
Antarctica is the coldest, windiest and driest continent, and on average the highest, because its ice sheet is up to nearly five kilometres thick. That ice holds about seventy per cent of the world's fresh water. Nobody lives there permanently, and under the Antarctic Treaty, signed in 1959, no country can own it; it is kept for peace and science. Around the POLE, scientists live in research stations through months of winter darkness.
Lines on the globe
The equator runs round the middle of the GLOBE, dividing the northern and southern HEMISPHERE, and lines of LATITUDE run parallel to it. The TROPICS are the warm band on either side, where the Sun can shine directly overhead. The grid also holds the ATLAS, the MAP, the COMPASS, each OCEAN between the continents, and the word REGION. Our map skills page covers how to read them all.
The equator is about 40,000 kilometres long, and because the Earth spins, a person standing on it is carried round at about 1,670 kilometres an hour without feeling a thing. At the poles you would simply turn on the spot once a day.