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An image of Afro-Eurasia, the largest landmass on Earth. A landmass, or land mass, is a large region or area of land that is in one piece and not noticeably broken up by oceans. [1] [2] The term is often used to refer to lands surrounded by an ocean or sea, such as a continent or a large island.
Earth formed about 4.54 billion years ago by accretion from the solar nebula, a disk-shaped mass of dust and gas left over from the formation of the Sun, which also created the rest of the Solar System. Initially, Earth was molten due to extreme volcanism and frequent collisions with other bodies.
Geometrically defined it is the centroid of all land surfaces within the two dimensions of the Geoid surface which approximates the Earth's outer shape. The term centre of minimum distance [ 1 ] specifies the concept more precisely as the domain is the sphere surface without boundary and not the three-dimensional body.
Pangaea, the supercontinent that existed about 200 million years ago and combined most of dry land on Earth into one giant landmass (according to the BBC), is well known.
Most of Earth's land hosts vegetation, [110] but considerable amounts of land are ice sheets (10%, [111] not including the equally large area of land under permafrost) [112] or deserts (33%). [113] The pedosphere is the outermost layer of Earth's land surface and is composed of soil and subject to soil formation processes. Soil is crucial for ...
The geologic time scale is a way of representing deep time based on events that have occurred throughout Earth's history, a time span of about 4.54 ± 0.05 Ga (4.54 billion years). [3] It chronologically organises strata, and subsequently time, by observing fundamental changes in stratigraphy that correspond to major geological or ...
Dymaxion map of the world with the 30 largest countries and territories by area. This is a list of the world's countries and their dependencies, ranked by total area, including land and water. This list includes entries that are not limited to those in the ISO 3166-1 standard, which covers sovereign states and dependent territories.
Much Web-based mapping uses a zoomable version of the Mercator projection with an aspect ratio of one. In this case the maximum latitude attained must correspond to y = ± W / 2 , or equivalently y / R = π. Any of the inverse transformation formulae may be used to calculate the corresponding latitudes: