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Global map showing location of the Equator. Equatorial Africa is an ambiguous term that sometimes is used to refer either to the equatorial region of sub-Saharan Africa traversed by the Equator, [1] more broadly to tropical Africa or in a biological and geo-environmental sense to the intra-tropical African rainforest region.
Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent after Asia. At about 30.3 million km 2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 20% of Earth's land area and 6% of its total surface area. [9] With nearly 1.4 billion people as of 2021, it accounts for about 18% of the world's human population.
The Maghreb is a region of northwest Africa encompassing the coastlands and Atlas Mountains of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. The Sahara Desert is the massive sparsely populated region in North Africa that contains the world's largest hot deserts; Sub-Saharan Africa is the area of the African continent which lies south of the Sahara.
Sub-Saharan Africa is a major producer of gold, producing up to 30% of global production. Major suppliers are South Africa, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Guinea, and Mali. South Africa had been first in the world in terms of gold production since 1905, but in 2007 it moved to second place, according to GFMS, the precious metals consultancy. [171]
Satellite view of Africa 1916 physical map of Africa. The average elevation of the continent approximates closely to 600 m (2,000 ft) above sea level, roughly near to the mean elevation of both North and South America, but considerably less than that of Asia, 950 m (3,120 ft). In contrast with other continents, it is marked by the comparatively ...
Graph showing the zonally averaged monthly precipitation. The tropics receive more precipitation than higher latitudes. The precipitation maximum, which follows the solar equator through the year, is under the rising branch of the Hadley circulation. The sub-tropical minima are under the descending branch and cause the formation of desert areas.
It has been conjectured to have influenced people's views of the world: because it shows countries near the Equator as too small when compared to those of Europe and North America, it has been supposed to cause people to consider those countries as less important. [14] Mercator himself used the equal-area sinusoidal projection to show relative ...
Road sign marking the equator near Nanyuki, Kenya. The latitude of the Earth's equator is, by definition, 0° (zero degrees) of arc.The equator is one of the five notable circles of latitude on Earth; the other four are the two polar circles (the Arctic Circle and the Antarctic Circle) and the two tropical circles (the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn).