Europe

Europe is a continent lying entirely in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere, 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 shares the landmass of Eurasia with Asia and is commonly held to be separated from Asia by the Ural Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian Sea, the Greater Caucasus, the Black Sea and the Turkish straits. It covers roughly ten million square kilometres, which makes it the second smallest continent on the seven continent model, and it is politically divided into about fifty sovereign states, of which Russia is the largest. Warm Atlantic currents such as the Gulf Stream give much of it a temperate climate. This atlas uses the continent as a broad region for movements, texts, orders and sites of European origin.