North America is a continent in the Northern and Western hemispheres, bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, and the Pacific Ocean to the south and west.
Covering roughly 24.7 million square kilometres, North America is the third-largest continent by area and fourth-largest by population, home to over 592 million people across 23 independent states and territories. It encompasses the subregions of Northern America — Canada, Greenland, the continental United States and associated islands — and Middle America, which includes Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. People have lived on the continent for at least 20,000 years, though evidence suggests possibly earlier habitation. The Paleo-Indian period gave way to the Archaic period around 10,000 years ago. Norse explorers built settlements in Greenland and Newfoundland in the late tenth century, centuries before Christopher Columbus’s 1492 voyage initiated sustained European contact. Today the continent’s landscapes span Arctic tundra, boreal forests, temperate rainforests, deserts and tropical ecosystems, supporting extraordinary biodiversity and offering some of the world’s most varied terrain for exploration and conservation work.
