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List of countries and dependencies by area. Dymaxion map of the world with the 30 largest countries and territories by area. This is a list of the world's countries and their dependencies by land, water, and total area, ranked by total area. The entries in this list include, but are not limited to, those in the ISO 3166-1 standard, which ...
In geology, a continent is defined as "one of Earth's major landmasses, including both dry land and continental shelves". The geological continents correspond to seven large areas of continental crust that are found on the tectonic plates , but exclude small continental fragments such as Madagascar that are generally referred to as microcontinents.
Earth is rounded into an ellipsoid with a circumference of about 40,000 km. It is the densest planet in the Solar System. Of the four rocky planets, it is the largest and most massive. Earth is about eight light-minutes away from the Sun and orbits it, taking a year (about 365.25 days) to complete one revolution.
The land hemisphere has the substantial majority of the planet's land (80.1 percent), including nearly all of Asia (with Maritime Southeast Asia being the only notable exception) and most of South America. Africa, Europe, and North America are solely within the land hemisphere. However, even in the land hemisphere, the water area still slightly ...
The heaviest land mammal is the African bush elephant, which has a weight of up to 10.1 t (11.1 short tons). It measures 10–13 ft at the shoulder and consumes around 230 kg (500 lb) of vegetation a day. Its tusks have been known to reach 2.7 m (9 ft) in length, although in modern populations they are most commonly recorded at a length of 0.6 ...
The geological history of the Earth follows the major geological events in Earth's past based on the geological time scale, a system of chronological measurement based on the study of the planet's rock layers ( stratigraphy ). Earth formed about 4.54 billion years ago by accretion from the solar nebula, a disk-shaped mass of dust and gas left ...
Its mass is substantially less than the combined mass of the other objects in its orbit: 0.07 times, in contrast to Earth, which is 1.7 million times the remaining mass in its orbit (excluding the moon). The IAU further decided that bodies that, like Pluto, meet criteria 1 and 2, but do not meet criterion 3 would be called dwarf planets.
A landmass, or land mass, is a large region or area of land that is in one piece and not broken up by oceans. [1] [2] The term is often used to refer to lands surrounded by an ocean or sea, such as a continent or a large island. [3] [4] In the field of geology, a landmass is a defined section of continental crust extending above sea level.