Afro-Eurasia encompasses 85,135,000 km2 (32,871,000 sq mi), 57% of the world's land area, and has a population of approximately 6.7 billion people, roughly 86% of theworld population. Together withmainland Australia, they comprise the vast majority of the land in the world'sEastern Hemisphere. The Afro-Eurasian mainland is the largest and most populous contiguous landmass onEarth.
The following terms are used for similar concepts:
Ecumene: a term fromclassical antiquity for the world as was known to ancient Greek scholars, which was limited to Europe and parts of Africa and Asia.
Although Afro-Eurasia is typically considered to comprise two or three separatecontinents, it is not a propersupercontinent. Instead, it is the largest present part of thesupercontinent cycle.[5]
Conventionally, Africa is joined toEurasia only by a relatively narrowland bridge (which has been split by theSuez Canal at theIsthmus of Suez) and remains separated from Europe by the straits of Gibraltar andSicily.
Paleogeologist Ronald Blakey has described the next 15 to 100 million years of tectonic development as fairly settled and predictable.[6] In that time, Africa is expected to continuedrifting northward. It will close theStrait of Gibraltar,[7] quickly evaporating theMediterranean Sea.[8] No supercontinent will form within the settled time frame, however, and the geologic record is full of unexpected shifts in tectonic activity that make further projections "very, very speculative".[6] Three possibilities are known asNovopangaea,Amasia, andPangaea Proxima.[9] In the first two, thePacific closes and Africa remains fused to Eurasia, but Eurasia itself splits as Africa and Europe spin towards the west; in the last, the trio spin eastward together as theAtlantic closes, creating land borders with theAmericas.
This is a list of the points that are farther north, south, east or west than any other location as well as the highest and lowest elevations on Afro-Eurasia.
^"This Big Era and the Three Essential Questions".whfua.history.ucla.edu. University of California, Los Angeles.For more than five millennia the population of Afroeurasia had grown steadily, forming larger and more complex political units such as the Han Chinese, Persian Achaemenid, and Roman empires.
^Cloud, Preston (1988).Oasis in space. Earth history from the beginning. New York:W. W. Norton & Company Inc. p. 440.ISBN0-393-01952-7.Only the inflow of Atlantic water maintains the present Mediterranean level. When that was shut off sometime between 6.5 to 6 MYBP, net evaporative loss set in at the rate of around 3,300 cubic kilometers yearly. At that rate, the 3.7 million cubic kilometres of water in the basin would dry up in scarcely more than a thousand years, leaving an extensive layer of salt some tens of meters thick and raising global sea level about 12 meters.
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