Our World and Its Features

All About the World

The planet we live on is Planet Earth, which is situated in the solar system we live in. It is the third planet in line from the sun, following Mercury and Venus. Planet Earth is the most massive terrestrial planet in this solar system, in other words Earth is the largest land-based planet, but there are gas-based planets like Saturn which are larger.

There is no planet other than Earth where life exists, as far as we know. The Earth has some special features that let life exist, for exampme the Earth’s magnetic field and the well-known ozone layer which keeps out harmful radiation. Scientists expect that the Earth will be able to sustain life for 1.5 billion more years before the biosphere is destroyed.

The planet’s surface consists of tectonic plates, which slowly move around to other places on the Earth’s surface over millions of years. Around 71% of the planet’s surface is covered by salt-water oceans, and the other 29% is made up of land masses and islands.

Earth completes one orbit of the Sun approximately every 365 1/4 days. And because of the Earth’s tilted angle of 23.4 degrees, seasonal variation occurs as the planet orbits around the Sun.

The various large land masses of the Earth are normally categorized into seven continents. Australia, Antarctica, Europe, Africa, North America, Asia, and South America are the names of the seven continents. These various continents all have different climates and weather patterns based on their longitude and latitude, distance from the equator, elevation, and other factors. Places near the equator generally have less seasonal differences and feature a tropical climate all year-round.

Excluding Antarctica which is mostly unpopulated except for some research stations, all the continents have signifcant-to-large populations. The most populous continent is Asia with around 3.9 billion people. Africa is in second place with a total population of around 922 million. Europe is in third place with around 731 million people. North America is fourth with 528,729,588 people. In fifth place is South America with a total population of about 382 million. Australia is in 6th place with its relatively small population of 32 million. And in last place is Antarctica with a small population of around 1000, mostly researchers. China and India both have massive populations of over 1 billion people.