What is the terrain and geography like in World?
Total Area |
196,938,799 Square Miles 510,072,000 Square Kilometers |
Land Area |
57,505,734 Square Miles 148,940,000 Square Kilometers |
Water Area |
139,433,065 Square Miles 361,132,000 Square Kilometers |
Land Boundaries |
156,001 Miles 251,060 Kilometers |
Coastline |
221,208 Miles 356,000 Kilometers |
Terrain | the greatest ocean depth is the Mariana Trench at 10,924 m in the Pacific Ocean |
Highest Point | 8,850 Meters |
Highest Point Location | Mount Everest |
Lowest Point | -2,555 Meters |
Lowest Point Location | Bentley Subglacial Trench (Antarctica) |
Natural Resources | the rapid depletion of nonrenewable mineral resources, the depletion of forest areas and wetlands, the extinction of animal and plant species, and the deterioration in air and water quality (especially in some countries of Eastern Europe, the former USSR, and China) pose serious long-term problems that governments and peoples are only beginning to address |
Time Zone |
time difference: there are 21 World entities (20 countries and 1 dependency) with multiple time zones: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ecuador, France, Greenland (part of the Danish Kingdom), Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kiribati, Mexico, Micronesia, Mongolia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Portugal, Russia, Spain, United States note 1: in some instances, the time zones pertain to portions of a country that lie overseas note 2: in 1851, the British set their prime meridian (0° longitude) through the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England; this meridian became the international standard in 1884 and thus the basis for the standard time zones of the World; today, GMT is officially known as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) and is also referred to as "Zulu time"; UTC is the basis for all civil time, with the World divided into time zones expressed as positive or negative differences from UTC note 3: each time zone is based on 15° starting from the prime meridian; in theory, there are 24 time zones based on the solar day, but there are now upward of 40 because of fractional hour offsets that adjust for various political and physical geographic realities; see the Standard Time Zones of the World map included with the World and Regional Maps |
Daylight saving time | daylight saving time: some 67 countries - including most of the World's leading industrialized nations - use daylight savings time (DST) in at least a portion of the country; China, Japan, India, and Russia are major industrialized countries that do not use DST; Asia and Africa generally do not observe DST and it is generally not observed near the equator, where sunrise and sunset times do not vary enough to justify it; some countries observe DST only in certain regions; for example, only southeastern Australia observes it; in fact, only a minority of the World's population - about 20% - uses DST |