page_title: Continent
section_title: Area and population
hierarchical_section_title: Continent / Area and population
caption_attribution_description: Created by Marcelo Garza from Data on Wikipedia's "World Population" article.
context_page_description: A continent is one of several very large landmasses. Generally identified by convention rather than any strict criteria, up to seven regions are commonly regarded as continents. Ordered from largest in area to smallest, these seven regions are: Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Antarctica, Europe, and Australia. Variations with fewer continents may merge some of these, for example some systems include Eurasia or America as single continents.
  Geologically, the continents correspond to areas of continental crust that are found on the continental plates, but include continental fragments such as Madagascar that are not commonly referred to as continents. Some geological continents are largely covered with water, such as Zealandia. Continental crust is only known to exist on Earth.
  Oceanic islands are frequently grouped with a neighbouring continent to divide all the world's land into regions. Under this scheme, most of the island countries and territories in the Pacific Ocean are grouped together with the continent of Australia to form a region called Oceania.
context_section_description: The following table summarizes the area and population of the continental regions used by the United Nations. These regions differ from the physical continents in various ways that are explained in the notes.
  Includes the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt.
  Population is non-permanent and varies.
  Includes East Thrace (Turkey) and Western New Guinea (Indonesia), excludes European Russia and Egypt.
  Excludes Asiatic Russia, excludes Turkey.
  Includes Central America and the Caribbean.
  Excludes Indonesia.
  The total land area of all continents is 148,647,000 square kilometres (57,393,000 sq mi), or 29.1% of earth's surface (510,065,600 km² or 196,937,400 sq mi).
caption: Graph showing population by continent as a percentage of world population (1750–2005)
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