Geography of the American continent

|- ! style=" border-signal: none" | The American continent. |} Discovered by Europeans in 1492, baptized in the honor of the navigator Amerigo Vespucci by Martin Waldseemüller, America is a Continent which is stretched on more than 15.000 km of the Alaska to the Ground of Fire. It is divided into two sub-continents: the North America with Anglo-Saxon and developed prevalence and the primarily Latin South America and development. These two geographical units are connected by a Isthme located between the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean.

America, a continent marked by diversity

The fifth part of the Earth

With a surface of 42 189 120 km ², the America is the largest continent after the Asia. America forms a continent with the direction where it constitutes “vast wide ground of only one holding”: it is surrounded by the Arctic Oceans (in north), the Atlantic (in the east) and the Pacific in the West. This relative insulation marked its history and its settlement besides: thus, the Amerindians lived a long time without major contact with the people of the other continents. On the Olympic Flag, the red ring represents it, at the sides of the four other continents. America is separated from the Asia by the Bering Strait and from the the Antarctic by the Détroit of Drake. Its extreme points are the Cape Morris Jesup in Greenland and the Cape Horn. Its lengthened form makes of it the continent more stretched in latitude, so that it is concerned with five climatic zones.

Two subsets

The majority of the atlas and the Géopolitique distinguish two parts in America, the North America with anglophone majority and the South America with Spanish-speaking majority (and Portuguese-speaking). The two parts are connected only by one narrow strip of land, of the Mexico to the Isthme of Panama. One can also speak about Central America to indicate the countries located between these two blocks.

Other divisions

The archipelago of the the Antilles is attached to the American continent: they are close to the Florida (Détroit of Florida), to Mexico (Canal of Yucatan) and surround in the east the Caribbean Sea. As for the Greenland, it is close to the islands of the Canadian far North and it was initially populated by populations coming from America.

The American continent is divided into large regional organizations, of which most powerful is that of ALENA. The Mercosur joins together several countries around the Brésil.

From an economic point of view, one can distinguish five units: rich and developed Anglo-Saxon America, Mexico, the Central America and West-Indian, Andean America and South America industrialized.

play of the borders binationales in America - En kilomètres

Physical geography

Relief

to supplement

great mountainous units:

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