Physiographically, Europe is the northwestern constituent of the larger landmass known as Eurasia, or Africa-Eurasia: Asia occupies the eastern bulk of this continuous landmass (save the Suez Canal separating Asia and Africa) and all share a common continental shelf. Europe’s eastern frontier is now commonly delineated by the Ural Mountains in Russia (Strabo, Geography 11.1, took the Tanais River to be the boundary, as did early Judaic sources). The south-east boundary with Asia is not universally defined. Most commonly the Ural or, alternatively, the Emba River serve as possible boundaries. The boundary continues to the Caspian Sea, the crest of the Caucasus Mountains or, alternatively, the Kura River in the Caucasus, and on to the Black Sea; the Bosporus, the Sea of Marmara, and the Dardanelles conclude the Asian boundary. However, numerous geographers consider Azerbaijan’s and Armenia’s southern border with Iran and Turkey’s southern and eastern border with Syria, Iraq and Iran as the boundary between Asia and Europe because of political and cultural reasons. The Mediterranean Sea to the south separates Europe from Africa. The western boundary is the Atlantic Ocean; Iceland, though nearer to Greenland (North America) than mainland Europe, is generally included in Europe. There is ongoing debate on where the geographical centre of Europe is. For detailed description of the boundary between Asia and Europe see here.
Due to sociopolitical and cultural differences, there are various descriptions of Europe’s boundary; in some sources, some territories are not included in Europe, while other sources include them. For instance, geographers from Russia and other post-Soviet states generally include the Urals in Europe while including Caucasia in Asia.
In another usage, Europe is increasingly being used as a short-form for the European Union (EU) and its members, currently consisting of 25 member states and the candidate countries negotiating for membership, and several other countries expected to begin negotiations in the future (see Enlargement of the European Union). This definition, however, excludes non-members such as Switzerland, Norway and Russia.
Land relief in Europe shows great variation within relatively small areas. The southern regions, however, are more mountainous, while moving north the terrain descends from the high Alps, Pyrenees and Carpathians, through hilly uplands, into broad, low northern plains, which are vast in the east. This extended lowland is known as the Great European Plain, and at its heart lies the North German Plain. An arc of uplands also exists along the north-western seaboard, beginning in the western British Isles and continuing along the mountainous, fjord-cut spine of Norway.
This description is simplified. Sub-regions such as Iberia and Italy contain their own complex features, as does mainland Europe itself, where the relief contains many plateaus, river valleys and basins that complicate the general trend. Iceland and the British Isles are special cases. The former is a land unto itself in the northern ocean which is counted as part of Europe, while the latter are upland areas that were once joined to the mainland until rising sea levels cut them off.
In Greek mythology, Europa was a Phoenician princess who was abducted by Zeus in bull form and taken to the island of Crete, where she gave birth to Minos. For Homer, Europe (Greek: Εὐρώπη Eurṓpē; see also List of traditional Greek place names) was a mythological queen of Crete, not a geographical designation. Later Europa stood for mainland Greece, and by 500 BC its meaning had been extended to lands to the north.
The Greek term Europe is derived from Greek words meaning broad (eurys) and face (ops) – broad having been an epithet of Earth herself in the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European religion; see Prithvi (Plataia). A minority, however, suggest this Greek popular etymology is really based on a Semitic word such as the Akkadian erebu meaning “sunset”[3] (see also Erebus). From the Middle Eastern vantagepoint, the sun does set over Europe, the lands to the west. Likewise, Asia is sometimes thought to have derived from a Semitic word such as the Akkadian asu, meaning “sunrise”,[4] and is the land to the east from a Middle Eastern perspective.
The majority of major world languages use words derived from “Europa” to refer to the continent – e.g. Chinese uses the word Ōuzhōu (歐洲), which is an abbreviation of the transliterated name Ōuluóbā zhōu (歐羅巴洲).
Europe is one of the seven traditional continents of the Earth. The term continent here refers to a cultural and political distinction rather than a physiographic one, leading to various perspectives about Europe’s precise borders. Physically and geologically, Europe is the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, west of Asia. Europe is bounded to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the west by the Atlantic Ocean, to the south by the Mediterranean Sea, and to the southeast by the waterways adjoining the Mediterranean to and including the Black Sea and the Caucasus Mountains. On the east, Europe is divided from Asia by the water divide of the Ural Mountains and by the Caspian Sea.
Europe is the world’s second-smallest continent in terms of area, covering about 10,400,000 square kilometres (4,010,000 sq mi) or 2.0% of the Earth’s surface. The only continent smaller than Europe is Australia. In terms of population, it is the third-largest continent (after Asia and Africa) with a population of some 710,000,000 or about 11% of the world’s population.
The European Union – comprising 25 member states, with two countries acceding in 2007 (Bulgaria and Romania) and two candidates in accession negotiations (Turkey and Croatia) – is the largest political and economic entity covering the European continent, while Russia (excluding portions in Asia) is the second largest entity and Europe’s largest state in area and population. The European Union also featured the world’s largest economy with an estimated nominal GDP of 13.4 trillion USD, with the nominal GDP per capita ranging from $66,463 in Luxembourg and $45,707 in Ireland to about $10,452 in the Czech Republic.