continentsNorth

continentsNorth is an informal, nonstandard geographic label used to refer to the set of continental landmasses that lie predominantly in the Northern Hemisphere. It is not an official term in geography, and there is no universal criteria for its boundary.

In most casual or dataset-oriented contexts, continentsNorth includes Asia, Europe, and North America, where the continents are entirely north of the equator. Africa is sometimes included in continentsNorth, since its northern portion lies well above the equator, though a portion of Africa extends into the Southern Hemisphere and different thresholds may produce different results. By contrast, South America, Australia/Oceania, and Antarctica are typically excluded, as they lie largely in the Southern Hemisphere or entirely there.

Because the term is informal, definitions vary; some analyses emphasize latitude bands or land area above 0° latitude, others use a majority-above-equator rule. Use of this label is common in discussions of hemispheric patterns in climate, solar exposure, and historical settlement, but it can be misleading if taken as a formal geographic division. In education and standard atlases, the conventional continents classification does not adopt continentsNorth; the term appears mainly in specialized datasets or thought experiments.