This is a list of countries with territory that straddles more than one continent, known as transcontinental states or intercontinental states. [1]
Contiguous transcontinental countries are states that have one continuous or immediately-adjacent piece of territory that spans a continental boundary, most commonly the line that separates Asia and Europe. By contrast, non-contiguous transcontinental countries are those states that have portions of territory that are separated from one another either by a body of water or by other countries (such as in the case of France). Most non-contiguous transcontinental countries are countries with dependencies like United Kingdom with its overseas territories, but can be countries that have fully integrated former dependencies in their central states like France with its overseas regions. [1]
For the purposes of this article, a seven-continent model is assumed based on common terms of reference by English language geographers. [2] Combined continents like "the Americas" and "Eurasia" are not acknowledged or referenced. The boundary between Asia and Europe is largely conventional (much of it over land), and several conventions remained in use well into the 20th century. However, the now-prevalent convention—which has been in use by some cartographers since about 1850—follows the Caucasus northern chain, the Ural River and the Ural Mountains, is used for the purposes of this list. [3] This convention results in several countries such as in the case of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkey finding themselves almost entirely in 'Asia', with a few small enclaves or districts technically in 'Europe'. Notwithstanding these anomalies, this list of transcontinental or intercontinental states respects the convention that Europe and Asia are full continents rather than subcontinents or component landmasses of a larger Eurasian continent.
Listed further below, separately, are countries with distant non-contiguous parts (overseas territories) on separate continents.
The lists within this article include entries that meet the following criteria:
The boundaries between the continents can be vague and subject to interpretation, making it difficult to conclusively define what counts as a 'transcontinental state'.
This section possibly contains original research .(November 2022) |
Contiguous transcontinental states are those countries that have one continuous or immediately adjacent piece of territory that spans a continental boundary. More specifically, they contain a portion of their territory on one continent and a portion of their territory on another continent, while having these two portions connected via a natural geological land connection (e.g. Russia) or the two portions being immediately adjacent to one another (e.g. Turkey). [6] [7] In other words, someone can travel to another continent without changing the country (without crossing a border).
The modern convention for the land boundary between Asia and Africa runs along the Isthmus of Suez and the Suez Canal in Egypt. The border continues through the Gulf of Suez, Red Sea, and Gulf of Aden. In antiquity, Egypt had been considered part of Asia,[ citation needed ] with the Catabathmus Magnus escarpment taken as the boundary with Africa (Libya).
The conventional Asia-Europe boundary was subject to considerable variation during the 18th and 19th centuries, indicated anywhere between the Don River and the Caucasus to the south or the Ural Mountains to the east. Since the late 19th century, the Caucasus–Urals boundary has become almost universally accepted. According to this now-standard convention, the boundary follows the Aegean Sea, the Turkish Straits, the Black Sea, along the watershed of the Greater Caucasus, the northwestern portion of the Caspian Sea and along the Ural River and Ural Mountains to the Arctic Ocean. [8] [9]
According to this convention, the following countries have territory in both Asia and Europe.
The conventional boundary between North America and South America is at some point on the Colombia–Panama border, with the most common demarcation in atlases and other sources following the Darién Mountains watershed where the Isthmus of Panama meets the South American continent (see Darién Gap). This area encompasses a large watershed, forest and mountains in the northern portion of Colombia's Chocó Department and Panama's Darién province.
Some geographers prefer to use the Panama Canal [22] as the physical boundary between North and South America instead. [23] [ full citation needed ] Under this convention, its capital Panama City is classified as a South American city. Given the competing claims, the Panamanian sports governing bodies affiliate to differing continental/regional confederations: its athletics federation to South America's, its soccer federation to North, Central America and Caribbean's; its Olympic committee to both South America's and Central America's.
The special case of Caribbean islands adjacent to the South American coastline:
North American Caribbean islands administered by South American states:
Caribbean islands considered North American or South American:
Asia is the largest continent in the world by both land area and population. It covers an area of more than 44 million square kilometers, about 30% of Earth's total land area and 8% of Earth's total surface area. The continent, which has long been home to the majority of the human population, was the site of many of the first civilizations. Its 4.7 billion people constitute roughly 60% of the world's population.
The Far East is the geographical region that encompasses the easternmost portion of the Asian continent, including East, North and Southeast Asia. South Asia is sometimes also included in the definition of the term.
An island or isle is a piece of subcontinental land completely surrounded by water. Very small islands such as emergent land features on atolls can be called islets, skerries, cays or keys. An island in a river or a lake island may be called an eyot or ait, and a small island off the coast may be called a holm. Sedimentary islands in the Ganges Delta are called chars. A grouping of geographically or geologically related islands, such as the Philippines, is referred to as an archipelago.
North America is a continent in the Northern and Western Hemispheres. North America is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South America and the Caribbean Sea, and to the west and south by the Pacific Ocean. The region includes the Bahamas, Bermuda, Canada, the Caribbean, Central America, Clipperton Island, Greenland, Mexico, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Turks and Caicos Islands, and the United States.
Oceania is a geographical region including Australasia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. Outside of the English-speaking world, Oceania is generally considered a continent, while Australia is regarded as an island or a continental landmass contained inside of the larger continent of Oceania. Spanning the Eastern and Western Hemispheres, at the centre of the water hemisphere, Oceania is estimated to have a land area of about 9,000,000 square kilometres (3,500,000 sq mi) and a population of around 44.4 million as of 2022. When compared to the continents, Oceania is the smallest in land area and the second-least populated after Antarctica.
The Southern Hemisphere is the half (hemisphere) of Earth that is south of the Equator. It contains all or parts of five continents and four oceans, as well as New Zealand and most of the Pacific Islands in Oceania. Its surface is 80.9% water, compared with 60.7% water in the Northern Hemisphere, and it contains 32.7% of Earth's land.
Mainland is defined as "relating to or forming the main part of a country or continent, not including the islands around it [regardless of status under territorial jurisdiction by an entity]." The term is often politically, economically and/or demographically more significant than politically associated remote territories, such as exclaves or oceanic islands situated outside the continental shelf.
A subregion is a part of a larger region or continent. Cardinal directions are commonly used to define subregions. There are many criteria for creating systems of subregions; this article is focusing on the UN statistical geoscheme, which is a changing, constantly updated, UN tool based on specific political geography considerations relevant in UN statistics.
Geography of Asia reviews geographical concepts of classifying Asia, the central and eastern part of Eurasia, comprising 58 countries and territories.
The World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) is a biogeographical system developed by the international Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) organization, formerly the International Working Group on Taxonomic Databases. The WGSRPD standards, like other standards for data fields in botanical databases, were developed to promote "the wider and more effective dissemination of information about the world's heritage of biological organisms for the benefit of the world at large". The system provides clear definitions and codes for recording plant distributions at four scales or levels, from "botanical continents" down to parts of large countries. The codes may be referred to as TDWG geographical codes. Current users of the system include the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Germplasm Resources Information Network (GRIN), and Plants of the World Online (POWO).
Determining the boundaries between the continents is generally a matter of geographical convention. Several slightly different conventions are in use. The number of continents is most commonly considered seven but may range as low as four when Afro-Eurasia and the Americas are both considered as single continents. An island can be considered to be associated with a given continent by either lying on the continent's adjacent continental shelf or being a part of a microcontinent on the same principal tectonic plate. An island can also be entirely oceanic while still being associated with a continent by geology or by common geopolitical convention. Another example is the grouping into Oceania of the Pacific Islands with Australia and Zealandia.
A continent is any of several large geographical regions. Continents are generally identified by convention rather than any strict criteria. A continent could be a single landmass or a part of a very large landmass, as in the case of Asia or Europe. Due to this, the number of continents varies; up to seven or as few as four geographical regions are commonly regarded as continents. Most English-speaking countries recognize seven regions as continents. In order from largest to smallest in area, these seven regions are Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Antarctica, Europe, and Australia. Different variations with fewer continents merge some of these regions; examples of this are merging North America and South America into America, Asia and Europe into Eurasia, and Africa, Asia, and Europe into Afro-Eurasia.
The continent of Australia, sometimes known in technical contexts by the names Sahul, Australia-New Guinea, Australinea, or Meganesia to distinguish it from the country of Australia, is located within the Southern and Eastern hemispheres. The continent includes mainland Australia, Tasmania, the island of New Guinea, the Aru Islands, the Ashmore and Cartier Islands, most of the Coral Sea Islands, and some other nearby islands. Situated in the geographical region of Oceania, Australia is the smallest of the seven traditional continents.
Insular Chile, also called Las islas Esporádicas, or "the Sporadic Islands", is a scattered group of oceanic islands of volcanic origin located in the South Pacific, and which are under the sovereignty of Chile. The islands lie on the Nazca Plate, separate from the South American continental plate.
A commonly accepted division between Asia and Europe ... is formed by the Ural Mountains, Ural River, Caspian Sea, Caucasus Mountains, and the Black Sea with its outlets, the Bosporus and Dardanelles.
Russia is culturally part of Europe and this will still be the case in the future.
Most of this account of the influence of the Hispanic languages in Oceania has dealt with the Western Pacific, but the Eastern Pacific has not been without some share of the presence of the Portuguese and Spanish. The Eastern Pacific does not have the multitude of islands so characteristic of the Western regions of this great ocean, but there are some: Easter Island, 2000 miles off the Chilean coast, where a Polynesian tongue, Rapanui, is still spoken; the Juan Fernandez group, 400 miles west of Valparaíso; the Galápagos archipelago, 650 miles west of Ecuador; Malpelo and Cocos, 300 miles off the Colombian and Costa Rican coasts respectively; and others. Not many of these islands have extensive populations — some have been used effectively as prisons — but the official language on each is Spanish.
Finally, a few comments on the area we consider to be part of "South America" are in order. Essentially we have followed the limits established by Meyer de Schauensee (1970: xii) with a few minor modifications. Thus, all the continental inshore islands are included (e.g., Trinidad and Tobago; various small islands off the northern coast of Venezuela, the Netherlands Antilles [Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao]; and Fernando de Noronha, off the northeastern coast of Brazil), but islands more properly considered part of the West Indies (e.g. Grenada) are not. To the south, we have opted to include the Falkland Islands (or Islas Malvinas — in referring to them as the Falklands we are not making any political statement but merely recognizing that this book is being written in the English language), as their avifauna is really very similar to that of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. However, various other islands farther out in the South Atlantic (e.g., South Georgia) are not included except incidentally (e.g., endemic South Georgia Pipit have been incorporated). Likewise, the Juan Fernández Islands far off the Chilean coast have not been included (except for incidental comments), nor have the Galápagos Islands, situated even further off the Ecuadorian coast.
Oceania is the word often used by continental geographers to describe the great world of islands we are now entering upon [...] This boundless watery domain, which extends northwards of Behring Straits and southward to the Antarctic barrier of ice, is studded with many island groups, which are, however, very irregularly distributed over its surface. The more northerly section, lying between Japan and California and between the Aleutian and Hawaiian Archipelagos is relived by nothing but a few solitary reefs and rocks at enormously distant intervals.
The regional name of the Pacific Islands is appropriate: Oceania, a sea of islands, including those of Alaska and Hawaii. The Pacific Basin is not insignificant or remote. It covers one third of the globe's surface. Its northern boundary is the Aleutian Islands chain. Oceania virtually touches all of the Western Hemisphere.
The Canary Islands are politically part of Spain, but geographically part of Africa, being islands of volcanic origin situated around one hundred miles off the coast of North-West Africa.
The offshore Canary Islands, although historically and geographically part of Africa, remained culturally, economically and politically part of Spain.
[we] can further define the word culture to mean language. Thus we have the French language part of Oceania, the Spanish part and the Japanese part. The Japanese culture groups of Oceania are the Bonin Islands, the Marcus Islands and the Volcano Islands. These three clusters, lying south and south-east of Japan, are inhabited either by Japanese or by people who have now completely fused with the Japanese race. Therefore they will not be taken into account in the proposed comparison of the policies of non – Oceanic cultures towards Oceanic peoples. On the eastern side of the Pacific are a number of Spanish language culture groups of islands. Two of them, the Galápagos and Easter Island, have been dealt with as separate chapters in this volume. Only one of the dozen or so Spanish culture island groups of Oceania has an Oceanic population — the Polynesians of Easter Island. The rest are either uninhabited or have a Spanish – Latin – American population consisting of people who migrated from the mainland. Therefore, the comparisons which follow refer almost exclusively to the English and French language cultures.
In a number of cases, human exploitation of certain high-value tree species, including sandalwoods and other highly prized timbers, has led to their extinction—such as the sandalwood species Santalum fernandezianum, in Juan Fernández Islands; and others to the brink of extinction, such S. boninensis in Ogasawara Islands, Japan; or is an ongoing threatening factor in the examples of S. yasi in Fiji and Tonga, Gyrinops spp. in Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Intsia bijuga throughout the Pacific Islands.
The Bonin Islands, now known as the Ogasawara Islands, are a group of subtropical islands located roughly equidistant between the Tokyo, Japan and the Northern Mariana Islands. This group of islands is nowhere near Tokyo, but it is still considered to be a part of Tokyo! The Ogasawara Islands consist of 30 subtropical islands made The Bonin Islands were said to be discovered first by Bernardo de la Torre, a Spanish explorer, who originally called the islands "Islas del Arzobispo" [,,,]
This paper covers the region from Irian Jaya (Western New Guinea, a province of New Guinea) in the west to Galápagos Islands (Equador) and Easter Island (Chile) in the east.
Oceania consists of Australasia, Polynesia and Malaysia. Australasia means South Asia. It comprises New Holland or Australia, Van Diemen's Land or Tasmania, Papua or New Guinea, Norfolk Island, New Zealand and some smaller islands. Polynesia is the term given to the various islands in the Pacific Ocean, which, as you may see on the map, are situated to the eastward of Australia, including the Philippine Islands. Malaysia is the name given to the islands of the Malay Archipelago, which are principally inhabited by the Malay race, comprising Borneo, the Sunday Isles, Celebes, Moluccas [...]
the whole region has sometimes been called Oceania, and sometimes Australasia—generally, however, in modern times, to the exclusion of the islands in the Indian archipelago, to which certain writers have given the name of Malaysia [...] we have the three geographical divisions of Malaysia, Australasia and Polynesia, the last mentioned of which embraces all the groups and single islands not included under the other two. Accepting this arrangement, still the limits between Australasia and Polynesia have not been very accurately defined; indeed, scarcely any two geographers appear to be quite agreed upon the subject; neither shall we pretend to decide in the matter. The following list, however, comprises all the principal groups and single island not previously named as coming under the division of Australasia: 1. North of the equator—The Ladrone or Marian islands. the Pelew islands, the Caroline islands, the Radack and Ralick chains, the Sandwich islands, Gilbert's or Kingstnill's archipelago. and the Galápagos. 2. South of the equator—The Ellice group, the Phoenix and Union groups. the Fiji islands, the Friendly islands, the Navigator's islands. Cook's or Harvey islands, the Society islands. the Dangerous archipelago, the Marquesas islands, Pitcairn island, and Easter island.
Mexico controls two small groups of Pacific Ocean islands — Islas Revilla Cigedo and Guadalupe — both less than 500 miles ... They have no indigenous population and are geographically part of Oceania
The British added the Ellice, Pitcairn and portions of the Phoenix Islands; the Australians consolidated their claims to Papua; and the French consolidated their claims to Clipperton islands; Easter and adjacent islands were claimed by Chile, Cocos Island was claimed by Costa Rica, and the Galápagos claimed by Ecuador. By 1900 there were virtually no remaining islands in Oceania unclaimed by foreign powers.
Easter Island on the east has been included on the basis of its Polynesian and biogeographic affinities even though it is politically apart. The other islands of the eastern Pacific (Galápagos, Juan Fernandez, etc.) have sometimes been included in Oceania.
Oceania is primarily considered as the restricted region treated in this paper, but for comparative purposes, in the table only, it is also considered in a broad sense as including New Guinea, Australia, New Caledonia, New Zealand, the Antipodes, and Galápagos.
The human colonization of remote Oceania occurred in the late Holocene. Prehistoric human explorers missed only the Galápagos and a very few out-of-the-way places as they surged east out of the Solomons, island-hopping thousands of kilometers through the Polynesian heartland to reach Hawaii to the far north, Easter Island over 7500km to the east and, New Zealand to the south
Oceania is a broadly applied term for the thousands of islands in the Pacific Ocean. They range from extremely small, uninhabited islands, to large ones, including Australia, New Zealand and New Guinea. Oceania is further grouped into three regions, Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia. There a few other Pacific island groups that do not fit into these groupings, such as Galápagos.