Every one of Earth's 100 highest mountains stands in Eurasia
Eurasia holds roughly 70% of humanity on about 36% of the world's land, and all 100 of the planet's tallest peaks. Splitting it into Europe and Asia is a cultural habit rather than a geological fact; the ancient Greeks even filed Africa under Asia while treating Europe as separate.
Europe and Asia together make up Eurasia, the largest continental area on Earth, about 55 million square kilometres or 36.2% of all land. Well over 5 billion people live there, and humans first arrived from Africa some 125,000 years ago. It stretches from Iceland and Iberia to the Russian Far East and from the Arctic coast to Maritime Southeast Asia, bounded by the Atlantic, Arctic and Pacific oceans, and joined to Africa at Suez to form the still larger Afro-Eurasia. Because of its size and range of latitude, it contains every climate type in the Köppen system.
Geologically it assembled between 375 and 325 million years ago as Siberia, Kazakhstania and Baltica merged, with Baltica also linked to North America. The Eurasian Plate today excludes India, Arabia and the far east of Russia beyond the Chersky Range. The Alpide belt of mountains runs about 15,000 km from Java to Iberia, taking in the Himalaya, Hindu Kush, Caucasus and Alps, and every summit above 7,000 m lies in the Himalaya, Karakoram and neighbouring ranges. Its largest islands include Borneo, Sumatra, Honshu and Great Britain, and Java is the most populous island on Earth.
Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley and China all rose within Eurasia, and by the mid-first millennium BCE a continuous belt of civilisations spanned its subtropics from Atlantic to Pacific, the main stage of world history for two thousand years. Iberian sailors opened new sea routes in the 1490s, the Suez Canal's completion in 1869 eased passage between the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean, and Soviet-led communism dominated much of the landmass until 1991.
The name also carries political weight. Halford Mackinder's ideas made Eurasia central to geopolitics, and Zbigniew Brzezinski argued that whoever dominated it would control most of the world's wealth and about three-quarters of its known energy. George Orwell used Eurasia as one of three superstates in 1984. Modern bodies include the Eurasian Economic Union, founded in 2015 with headquarters in Moscow and Minsk, and the Asia–Europe Meeting held every two years since 1996.
Source: Eurasia
