Europe is a continent entirely located in the Northern Hemisphere and especially in the Eastern Hemisphere. It consists of the westernmost part of Eurasia and is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and Asia to the east. It is generally believed that Europe is separated from Asia by the watershed of the Ural Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian Sea, the Greater Caucasus, the Black Sea and the waterways of the Turkish Straits. Although most of this border is over land, Europe as a whole is gaining the status of a full-fledged continent due to its large physical size and the weight of history and tradition.
Europe covers about 10,180,000 square kilometers (3,930,000 square miles), or 2% of the Earth’s surface (6.8% of land area), making it the sixth largest continent. Politically, Europe is divided into about fifty sovereign states, of which Russia is the largest and most populous, occupying 39% of the continent and representing 15% of its population. By 2018, the total population of Europe is about 741 million (about 11% of the world’s population). The European climate is heavily affected by warm Atlantic currents, which tame the winter and summer of much of the continent, even at latitudes with harsh climates in Asia and North America. Further from the sea, seasonal differences are more noticeable than near the coast.
The Age of Enlightenment, the subsequent French Revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars shaped the continent culturally, politically and economically from the late seventeenth to the first half of the nineteenth century. The Industrial Revolution, which began in Great Britain in the late 18th century, brought about radical economic, cultural and social changes in Western Europe and, ultimately, around the world. Both world wars took place mostly in Europe, which contributed to the decline of Western European dominance in world affairs until the mid-20th century, when the Soviet Union and the United States were known. During the Cold War, Europe was divided along the Iron Curtain between NATO in the West and the Warsaw Pact in the East until the 1989 revolutions and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
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