Regions

Africa

The world's second-largest continent and humanity's birthplace

Amazonia

The basin, the forest, and the flying rivers they make

Anatolia

Asia Minor, the peninsula that has always carried the traffic of continents

Antarctica

The frozen continent at the bottom of the world

Asia

Earth's largest and most populous continent

Australia and New Zealand

Two settler states, a continent and an archipelago, far from everywhere

Benelux

The Low Countries, and the small union that rehearsed the EU

Central America

The volcanic isthmus, plus a Mexico most people file elsewhere

Central Asia

The five stans, landlocked between Russia, China, and Iran

Central Europe

A region whose membership has always been a political argument

Eastern Africa

Rift valleys, great lakes, and half a billion people

Eastern Asia

China, Japan, the Koreas, Mongolia — a quarter of humanity

Eastern Europe

Ten states across the great plain, and Russia dwarfing them all

Europe

A small, intricate continent of outsized influence

Indochina

The mainland Southeast Asian peninsula, and a name under review

Latin America

A region defined by language, not by latitude

Melanesia

The big, dark islands of the southwest Pacific

Mesoamerica

The cultural hearth where the Americas invented the city

Mesopotamia

The land between the rivers, where the city was invented

Micronesia

Two thousand tiny islands scattered over an ocean

Middle Africa

The rainforest heart of the continent, drained by the Congo

North America

The third-largest continent, from the Arctic to the tropics

Northern Africa

The Saharan tier of the continent, facing the Mediterranean

Northern America

The continent's northern half, and a category that excludes Mexico

Northern Europe

The Nordics, the Baltics, and the British Isles in one box

Oceania

The smallest continent, built around Australia and the Pacific isles

Patagonia

Wind, ice, and the emptiest end of the Americas

Polynesia

The many islands, and the greatest navigation feat in history

Scandinavia

Three kingdoms bound by language, and a name that keeps expanding

Siberia

A tenth of the world's land, and the ground beneath it is thawing

South America

A continent of the Andes, the Amazon, and dazzling extremes

South-Eastern Asia

A mainland peninsula and 25,000 islands between two oceans

Southern Africa

Five states at the tip of the continent, built on rock and drought

Southern Asia

Two billion people below the Himalayas, plus Iran

Southern Europe

Three peninsulas, one sea, and the roots of the West

Sub-Saharan Africa

The African world that begins where the Sahara ends

The African Great Lakes

The rift lakes and the crowded, contested states around them

The Arab World

Twenty-two states bound by a language rather than a border

The Arabian Peninsula

The largest peninsula on Earth, and it has no rivers

The Arctic

The circumpolar north, warming four times faster than the world

The Australian Outback

Seventy percent of a continent, and almost nobody in it

The Balkans

Europe's most contested peninsula, where even the boundary is argued

The Baltic States

Three small nations on Europe's most closely watched frontier

The Caribbean

A sea, an archipelago, and thirteen states that share a history

The Caucasus

A mountain isthmus where Europe and Asia refuse to settle the line

The Congo Basin

The second great rainforest, and the peat beneath it

The Eurasian Steppe

The grass corridor that carried empires from Hungary to Manchuria

The Fertile Crescent

The arc of first farming, from the Nile to the Gulf

The Great Plains

The grass built the soil, and the plow found out

The Great Rift Valley

A continent tearing in two, and the trench it leaves behind

The Horn of Africa

The African peninsula that juts toward Arabia

The Iberian Peninsula

A high, dry tableland walled off by the Pyrenees

The Indian Subcontinent

South Asia, walled off by mountains and thrown out to sea

The Indo-Gangetic Plain

The debris of the Himalayas, and a billion people living on it

The Levant

The eastern Mediterranean shore and the land behind it

The Maghreb

Northwest Africa, the island between the sea and the sand

The Mediterranean Basin

A rare climate, an inland sea, and five thousand years of use

The Middle East

A region named from somewhere else, and still argued over

The Nile Valley

A green ribbon through the desert, holding a hundred million people

The Nordic Countries

Five states, three autonomous territories, and one stubborn social model

The Pampas

Soil deep enough to feed continents, flat enough to bore a surveyor

The Ring of Fire

The Pacific rim of subduction, where the ground does not hold still

The Sahel

The semi-arid belt where the Sahara frays into savanna

The Southern Cone

The temperate tail of South America, and the argument over who is in it

The Yucatan Peninsula

A limestone shelf, a buried crater, and water only underground

Western Africa

Sixteen states on the great bulge, from desert to rainforest

Western Asia

The UN's bureaucratic name for most of the Middle East

Western Europe

Nine wealthy states from the North Sea to the Alps