List of Continents: How the World Came to Have Seven

The standard list used in English-speaking schools has seven continents. From largest to smallest they are Asia (about 44.6 million km²), Africa (30.4 million km²), North America (24.2 million km²), South America (17.8 million km²), Antarctica (14.2 million km²), Europe (10 million km²) and Australia, or Oceania (8.5 million km² for the whole region). No single rule fixes the list. Continents are set by convention, so Latin America and Greece teach six (one America), parts of Eastern Europe count six (one Eurasia), and a strictly geological count reaches seven with a different line-up. The seven names were not agreed all at once. They were added one at a time over about 2,500 years, and the history below explains the order.

Europe, Asia and Libya: the three-part world of the Greek mariners

Ancient Greek mariners called the lands on either side of their main sea lane Europe and Asia. That lane ran through the Aegean Sea, the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmara, the Bosporus and the Black Sea. At first the names covered only the coasts and were later stretched inland. Because the dividing line was a waterway, it stopped where the waterway stopped. Greek geographers never found a convincing inland feature to carry the split across the single landmass we now call Eurasia, and that problem has never gone away.

The third member was Africa, which the Greeks called Libya. Writers argued over whether it was part of Asia or a separate part of the world, and the three-part division won out. The borders kept moving. Anaximander drew the Europe–Asia line along the Phasis River, today's Rioni in Georgia. Later writers moved it north to the Don, which they called the Tanais. Asia and Africa were usually divided at the Nile. In the 5th century BCE, Herodotus objected that this split Egypt in two. He placed the boundary on Egypt's western border instead, and he asked why one continuous landmass should be divided into three parts at all.

The Romans kept the scheme. Pliny the Elder, writing in the 1st century CE, said the whole globe was divided into Europe, Asia and Africa. Medieval scholars drew it as the T and O map: a circle of ocean split by a T of water into three parts, with Asia on top, Europe at bottom left and Africa at bottom right.

1507: Waldseemüller's map adds America as the fourth part

The first new member came from an error. Christopher Columbus reached the Caribbean in 1492 and made four voyages, yet he always believed the lands he found were part of Asia. In 1501 Amerigo Vespucci and Gonçalo Coelho sailed down the coast of Brazil, far further south than Asia was thought to reach. That convinced them the land was a continent of its own. An account of the voyage, Mundus Novus ("New World"), appeared under Vespucci's name in 1502 or 1503.

In April 1507 the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller published a large wall map, the Universalis Cosmographia. It was the first map to show the new lands separated from Asia by an ocean. In the book printed with it, Waldseemüller said the earth had four parts: Europe, Asia, Africa and a fourth part, which he named "America" after Vespucci. On the map the word sits on what is now South America. Of about a thousand copies, only one survives, bought by the Library of Congress in 2001.

For almost three centuries the list then stood at four. From the late 18th century some geographers began counting North and South America as two parts, which made five. The four-part division was still the usual one well into the 19th century.

Australia and Antarctica join the list, 1606–1838

Australia's place on the list grew slowly. Europeans first reached it in 1606, and for a long time it was treated as part of Asia. By the late 18th century some geographers called it a continent in its own right, the sixth for those who split the Americas and the fifth for those who did not. In 1813 Samuel Butler described New Holland as an immense island that some geographers "dignify" with the name of continent. Only in the 1950s did the idea of Australia as a continent replace the older idea of Oceania as one of the world's "great divisions". Australia's mainland covers 7,617,930 km² and counts as the smallest continent. Greenland, at 2,166,086 km², counts only as the largest island.

Antarctica was the last continent anyone saw. A great southern landmass had been expected for centuries, but the first recorded sighting came on 27 January 1820. It was made by the First Russian Antarctic Expedition under Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and Mikhail Lazarev, sailing the 985-ton sloop Vostok and the 530-ton Mirny, which logged an ice shelf about 32 km off what is now Queen Maud Land. Three days later, on 30 January, Edward Bransfield of the Royal Navy sighted land at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, and for a long time he was credited as the first. Charles Wilkes of the United States Exploring Expedition described the land as a continent in 1838. An atlas labelled it a continent in 1849, but few atlases did so until after the Second World War. It has no native human population. Since the Antarctic Treaty opened for signature on 1 December 1959, it has been kept as a scientific preserve, and the treaty had 58 parties as of 2024. The national claims that are frozen under the treaty are set out in our guide to Antarctica's territorial claims.

Why the Americas became two continents after the 1950s

The step that produced the seven-continent list came last, and it happened in classrooms rather than at sea. From the mid-19th century, atlases published in the United States more often showed North and South America as separate continents. European atlases usually kept them as one. Until the Second World War it was still common for American atlases to show a single America. From the 1950s most US geographers divided the Americas in two. Add Antarctica, and the result is the seven-continent model now taught in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia and the Philippines.

Latin America did not follow. Many people there see one America running from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, and the six-continent model with a combined America is still taught in Latin America, in Greece and in many Romance-speaking countries. The five Olympic rings reflect the same view: five inhabited continents, with the Americas counted once and Antarctica left out.

Where the seven meet: the Urals, the Caucasus, Suez and the Darién

Four of the seven continents share land borders, so their lines on the map are agreements, not coastlines. The Europe–Asia line moved several times. In 1725 Philip Johan von Strahlenberg broke with the classical Don boundary and drew the line along the Volga and then north along the Ural Mountains. Well into the 19th century, mapmakers still disagreed about the stretch between the lower Don and the Samara Bend. The line most atlases now use, including the National Geographic Society and the CIA World Factbook, runs through the Aegean, the Turkish Straits and the Black Sea. It then follows the watershed of the Greater Caucasus, the north-west Caspian, and the Ural River and Ural Mountains to the Kara Sea. On that line Russia, Turkey and Kazakhstan all hold land in both continents, and so do Georgia and Azerbaijan, whose northern fringes lie beyond the Caucasus watershed. The full list is in our post on countries that span two continents.

Two other borders run across narrow isthmuses. Africa and Asia meet at the Isthmus of Suez, which puts the Sinai Peninsula in Asia and makes Egypt a transcontinental country. Less than 2% of Egyptians live in Sinai, though. North and South America are most often divided along the Darién Mountains watershed on the Colombia–Panama border. The Suez and Panama canals cut through these isthmuses, but the canals themselves are not usually treated as the boundaries. The edge of the Australian continent is the hardest to draw. It lies somewhere in the Wallacean islands of Indonesia, and geologically western New Guinea and the Aru Islands belong to Australia, not Asia.

The seven continents today, by area and 2021 population

Here is the list as it stands, with Encyclopædia Britannica land areas and United Nations population estimates for 2021. The UN figures follow its own geoscheme. That puts all of Russia in Europe, all of Turkey and Kazakhstan in Asia, and all of Egypt in Africa, so the populations do not split the transcontinental countries.

The table shows how far apart area and population can be. Asia covers under 30% of the world's land but held about 59% of its people in 2021. Europe has less land than Antarctica but more than 16 times as many people as Oceania. Africa, the second-largest continent, held 17.6% of humanity in 2021.

Zealandia and the six- and four-continent lists

The list could still change, though geologists rather than mapmakers are now the ones proposing members. Geology defines a continent by four tests: it stands high above the ocean floor, contains a mix of igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary rock, has thick continental crust, and covers more than one million km² within clear limits. On that basis Zealandia was added in 2017. It is a block of continental crust of about 4.9 million km² that broke away from Gondwana 83 to 79 million years ago. About 94% of it now lies under the Pacific, and New Zealand and New Caledonia are its highest parts. The geological list of seven is Africa, Antarctica, Australia, Eurasia, North America, South America and Zealandia. Some geologists still dispute Zealandia's status, though a 2021 study found Precambrian rock in it.

The other schoolroom lists are shorter. Counting Eurasia as one landmass gives six continents, as many Russian and Eastern European textbooks do. Joining the Americas also gives six, as in Latin America. Following land connections strictly gives four: Afro-Eurasia, America, Antarctica and Australia. During the Pleistocene ice ages, when sea levels were lower, there were in effect only three separate landmasses. Afro-Eurasia and the Americas were joined by the Bering Land Bridge, and Australia and New Guinea formed a single continent called Sahul. The plates beneath these landmasses are still moving, as explained in our guide to the evidence for continental drift.