Europe EuropeEncyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Norway Noresund, Norway.
© Index Open Europe ’ s largest islands and archipelagoes include Novaya Zemlya, Franz Josef Land, Svalbard, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, the british Isles, the Balearic Islands, Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, Malta, Crete, and Cyprus. Its major peninsulas include Jutland and the Scandinavian, Iberian, Italian, and Balkan peninsulas. Indented by numerous bays, fjords, and seas, continental Europe ’ s highly irregular coastline is about 24,000 miles ( 38,000 km ) long .
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european Atlas
Are you familiar with the Lapland countries ? Where is the european das kapital of finance ? Venture through Europe and its colored countries in this quiz .
Among the continents, Europe is an anomaly. Larger only than Australia, it is a little extremity of Eurasia. Yet the peninsular and insular western extremity of the continent, thrusting toward the North Atlantic Ocean, provides—thanks to its latitude and its physical geography—a relatively genial homo habitat, and the long processes of homo history came to mark off the region as the home of a classifiable civilization. In cattiness of its home diversity, Europe has thus functioned, from the clock time it beginning emerged in the human awareness, as a world apart, concentrating—to borrow a phrase from Christopher Marlowe — “ countless riches in a little room. ” As a conceptual manufacture, Europa, as the more conditioned of the ancient Greeks first conceived it, stood in astute contrast to both Asia and Libya, the identify then applied to the known northerly contribution of Africa. Literally, Europa is now thought to have meant “ Mainland, ” quite than the earlier interpretation, “ Sunset. ” It appears to have suggested itself to the Greeks, in their nautical universe, as an appropriate appellation for the extensive northerly lands that lay beyond, lands with characteristics vaguely known yet clearly different from those implicit in in the concepts of Asia and Libya—both of which, relatively booming and civilized, were associated closely with the culture of the Greeks and their predecessors. From the Greek perspective then, Europa was culturally back and scantily settled. It was a barbarian world—that is, a non-Greek one, with its inhabitants making “ bar-bar ” noises in opaque tongues. Traders and travelers besides reported that the Europe beyond Greece possessed distinctive physical units, with batch systems and lowland river basins much larger than those familiar to inhabitants of the Mediterranean region. It was clear american samoa well that a succession of climates, markedly different from those of the Mediterranean borderlands, were to be experienced as Europe was penetrated from the confederacy. The broad eastern steppes and, to the west and north, aboriginal forests as however alone marginally touched by human occupancy further underscore environmental contrasts .
Athens: Acropolis The Acropolis and surrounding sphere, Athens .Neil Beer/Getty Images The empire of ancient Rome, at its greatest extent in the second hundred ce, revealed, and imprinted its culture on, much of the expression of the continent. Trade relations beyond its frontiers besides drew the distant regions into its sphere. Yet it was not until the 19th and 20th centuries that modern science was able to draw with some preciseness the geological and geographic lineaments of the European continent, the peoples of which had interim achieved domination over—and set in apparent motion vast countervailing movements among—the inhabitants of a lot of the stay of the earth ( see westerly colonialism ) .
Pont du Gard, Nîmes, France Pont du Gard, an ancient Roman aqueduct in Nîmes, France .© Karel Gallas/Shutterstock.com
As to the territorial limits of Europe, they may seem relatively acquit on its seaward flanks, but many island groups far to the north and west—Svalbard, the Faroes, Iceland, and the Madeira and Canary islands—are considered European, while Greenland ( though tied politically to Denmark ) is conventionally allocated to North America. Furthermore, the Mediterranean coastlands of North Africa and southwestern Asia besides exhibit some european physical and cultural affinities. Turkey and Cyprus in particular, while geologically asian, posse elements of european culture and may be regarded as parts of Europe. indeed, Turkey has sought membership in the European Union ( EU ), and the Republic of Cyprus joined the arrangement in 2004. Europe ’ south boundaries have been particularly unsealed, and hence much debated, on the east, where the continent merges, without sundering physical boundaries, with parts of western Asia. The eastbound limits immediately adopted by most geographers exclude the Caucasus area and encompass a little helping of Kazakhstan, where the European limit formed by the northern Caspian slide is connected to that of the Urals by Kazakhstan ’ s Emba River and Mughalzhar ( Mugodzhar ) Hills, themselves a southerly propagation of the Urals. Among the alternative boundaries proposed by geographers that have gained across-the-board credence is a scheme that sees the crown of the Greater Caucasus range as the dividing wrinkle between Europe and Asia, placing Ciscaucasia, the northern character of the Caucasus region, in Europe and Transcaucasia, the southerly function, in Asia. Another wide endorsed system puts the western assign of the Caucasus region in Europe and the eastern part—that is, the bulk of Azerbaijan and small portions of Armenia, Georgia, and Russia ’ randomness Caspian Sea coast—in Asia. inactive another scheme with many adherents locates the continental boundary along the Aras River and the turkish boundary line, thereby putting Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia in Europe. Europe ’ s eastern boundary, however, is not a cultural, political, or economic discontinuity on the land comparable, for model, to the insulating significance of the Himalayas, which clearly mark a northern limit to South asian civilization. Inhabited plains, with only the minor interruption of the worn-down Urals, extend from central Europe to the Yenisey River in central Siberia. Slavic-based culture dominates much of the district occupied by the former Soviet Union from the Baltic and Black seas to the Pacific Ocean. That refinement is distinguished from the rest of Europe by legacies of a medieval Mongol – tatar domination that precluded the sharing of many of the innovations and developments of european “ Western culture ” ; it became further classifiable during the relative isolation of the soviet period. In partitioning the earth into meaningful large geographic units, therefore, most mod geographers treated the erstwhile Soviet Union as a discrete territorial entity, comparable to a continent, that was slightly separate from Europe to the west and from Asia to the south and east ; that distinction has been maintained for Russia, which constituted three-fourths of the Soviet Union. Europe occupies some 4 million square miles ( 10 million square kilometer ) within the conventional borders assigned to it. That broad district reveals no bare oneness of geological structure, landform, easing, or climate. Rocks of all geological periods are exposed, and the mathematical process of geological forces during an huge succession of era has contributed to the mold of the landscapes of mountain, tableland, and lowland and has bequeathed a variety show of mineral reserves. Glaciation excessively has left its bell ringer over wide areas, and the processes of corrosion and deposition have created a highly variegated and compartmentalized countryside. Climatically, Europe benefits by having only a little proportion of its surface either excessively cold or besides hot and dry for effective colony and manipulation. Regional climatic contrasts however exist : oceanic, Mediterranean, and continental types occur widely, as act gradations from one to the early. Associated vegetation and land forms besides show continual variety, but alone portions of the dominant forest that clothed most of the celibate when humans inaugural appeared now remain. All in all, Europe enjoys a considerable and long-exploited resource base of territory, afforest, sea, and minerals ( notably coal ), but its people are increasingly its principal resource. The celibate, excluding Russia, contains less than one-tenth of the total population of the global, but in general its people are well educated and highly skilled. Europe besides supports gamey densities of population, concentrated in urban-industrial regions. A growing share of people in urban areas are employed in a wide range of servicing activities, which have come to dominate the economies of most countries. however, in manufacture and department of agriculture Europe hush occupies an eminent, if no longer necessarily predominant, stead. The initiation of the european Economic Community in 1957 and the EU in 1993 greatly enhanced economic cooperation between many of the celibate ’ mho countries. Europe ’ s continuing economic achievements are evidenced by its high standard of be and its successes in skill, technology, and the arts .
European Parliament european Parliament construct, Strasbourg, France .© Lukas Riebling This article treats the forcible and human geography of Europe. For discussion of individual countries of the continent, see specific articles by name—e.g., Italy, Poland, and United Kingdom. For discussion of major cities of the continent, see specific articles by name—e.g., Rome, Warsaw, and London. The chief articles discussing the historic and cultural development of the continent include history of Europe ; european exploration ; western colonialism ; Aegean civilizations ; ancient greek civilization ; ancient Rome ; Byzantine Empire ; and Holy Roman Empire. Related topics are discussed in such articles as those on religion ( for example, Judaism and Roman Catholicism ) and literature ( for example, greek literature ; Dutch literature ; and spanish literature ).
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