Physical Geography: World Extremes, Landforms & Key Lines

Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Antarctica, Europe, Australia (Oceania)

Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Southern, Arctic

Mount Everest, on the Nepal–China border: 8,849 m (29,032 ft) by the 2020 survey

The Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, western Pacific: about 10,900 m (nearly 11 km) deep

The Nile is usually listed as the longest (about 6,650 km); the Amazon carries by far the most water.

Antarctica is the largest desert overall (a desert is defined by low precipitation, not heat). The Sahara is the largest hot desert.

Largest: Russia. Smallest: Vatican City.

Greenland

The Caspian Sea is the largest lake by area. Lake Baikal in Siberia is the deepest and holds about a fifth of the world's unfrozen surface fresh water.

The shore of the Dead Sea (Israel, Jordan and the West Bank)

Angel Falls

The Andes

The world's largest coral reef system, off the coast of Queensland in northeastern Australia.

Latitude lines (parallels) run east–west and measure distance north or south of the Equator. Longitude lines (meridians) run north–south and measure distance east or west of the Prime Meridian.

The opposite meridian, 180°, roughly follows the International Date Line.

They mark the farthest points north and south where the sun can be directly overhead.

A horseshoe-shaped zone around the Pacific Ocean with most of the world's earthquakes and active volcanoes, caused by plate boundaries.

Convergent: plates collide (mountains, trenches, volcanoes) Divergent: plates move apart (mid-ocean ridges, rift valleys) Transform: plates slide past each other (earthquakes, like the San Andreas Fault)

The Indian Plate collided with the Eurasian Plate, pushing up the crust. The collision is still going on.

Weathering breaks rock down in place. Erosion moves the broken material away by water, wind, ice or gravity.

A delta is a landform built from sediment deposited where a river enters a sea or lake (the Nile Delta). An estuary is where a river's fresh water mixes with sea water at its mouth (the Chesapeake Bay).

Peninsula: land surrounded by water on three sides (Italy). Isthmus: a narrow strip of land joining two larger areas (Panama). Archipelago: a group of islands (Indonesia).

A dry area on the leeward (downwind) side of a mountain range: air drops its moisture rising over the windward side, then sinks and warms on the other side.

A seasonal shift in wind direction that brings a very wet season and a dry season, most famously in South Asia.

Earth's rotation deflects moving air and water to the right in the Northern Hemisphere and to the left in the Southern Hemisphere, shaping winds and ocean currents.

The Köppen climate classification