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Northern America
The continent's northern half, and a category that excludes Mexico
Northern America is a statistical category that trips people up, because it is not the same thing as North America. The UN uses it for the United States, Canada, Greenland, Bermuda, and the French islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon — and it pointedly leaves out Mexico, which is grouped with Central America instead. That single exclusion is the whole reason the term exists: it separates two rich, English- and French-speaking states with a shared frontier and a shared economy from the Spanish-speaking republics to the south. About 384 million people live in it, across a landmass of nearly 22 million square kilometers.
The physical geography is arranged in north-south bands. The Rocky Mountains and the coastal ranges wall off the Pacific side, rising to Denali in Alaska at 6,190 meters, the highest peak on the continent. East of them lie the Great Plains, then the Canadian Shield with its scoured rock and countless lakes, then the worn-down Appalachians and the Atlantic seaboard. The Mississippi drains the middle; the Great Lakes hold a fifth of the planet's surface fresh water. Greenland, geologically part of the continent though politically Danish, is buried under an ice sheet up to three kilometers thick. Climate runs from Arctic tundra to Florida's subtropics.
The two big countries share the longest undefended border on earth and one of the largest trade relationships, but not much else structurally: Canada is a parliamentary constitutional monarchy of 41 million clustered within a couple of hundred kilometers of the US line, while the United States is a federal republic of 342 million and the world's largest economy. Both were built on the dispossession of Indigenous nations and on waves of immigration, and both are among the most urbanized societies anywhere. Greenland, self-governing and home to fewer than 60,000 people, has lately become a geopolitical prize as melting ice opens Arctic shipping lanes and exposes its minerals.