Oceania
The smallest continent, built around Australia and the Pacific isles
Oceania is the smallest and most scattered of the continents, a region of roughly 8.5 million square kilometers (3.3 million square miles) anchored by the single landmass of Australia and spilling across thousands of Pacific islands. It takes in Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, and the island groups of Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia — a span of ocean wider than any other continent, even as its dry land amounts to less than any but Antarctica.
Australia dominates the region: an ancient, low, and largely arid continent whose red interior — the Outback — gives way to fertile coastal fringes where most of its people live. Offshore lies the Great Barrier Reef, the largest living structure on Earth. The geology grows more dramatic toward the Pacific, where New Guinea's Puncak Jaya reaches 4,884 meters (16,024 feet) and volcanic, earthquake-prone islands trace the Ring of Fire. New Zealand's Southern Alps and glaciers complete the contrast with Australia's flat heart.
About 47 million people live across Oceania, the fewest of any continent, the great majority of them in Australia and New Zealand. The vast distances between island groups shaped one of history's greatest feats of navigation, as Polynesian voyagers settled a third of the globe's surface by open-ocean canoe. Today those same distances make the region both remote and strategically vast.