Asia
Earth's largest and most populous continent
Asia is the giant of the continents — a single landmass holding nearly three in five people alive today across roughly 44.6 million square kilometers (17.2 million square miles). It stretches from the Arabian Peninsula and the Mediterranean coast in the west to the Pacific shores of Japan and Indonesia in the east, and from the Arctic tundra of Siberia south to the tropical islands straddling the equator. No other continent spans so many climates, cultures, or extremes of elevation.
The continent's geography is defined by superlatives. The Himalayas, thrown up by the collision of the Indian and Eurasian plates, carry Mount Everest to 8,849 meters (29,032 feet), the highest point on Earth. Far below, the shore of the Dead Sea lies about 430 meters beneath sea level, the lowest exposed land on the planet. Between them spread the Siberian plains, the Gobi and Arabian deserts, the Tibetan Plateau, and the great river systems — the Yangtze, Ganges, and Mekong — that cradled some of humanity's earliest civilizations.
Asia is also where the largest share of humanity's future will play out. China and India alone account for more than 2.8 billion people, and the continent holds some of the world's densest megacities alongside some of its emptiest expanses of cold desert and high plateau. Its economic weight has pulled the center of global trade eastward, even as the same mountains and monsoons that shaped its ancient empires still govern daily life for billions.