Northern America

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For other uses, see Northern America (disambiguation).
Not to be confused with North America.
Northern America
Northern America (orthographic projection).svg
Area21,780,142 km2 (8,409,360 sq mi)
Population358,593,810 (2016 est.)
GDP (nominal)$18.6 trillion
([1]
Countries
Dependencies
LanguagesEnglish, French, Spanish, Danish, Greenlandic, and various recognized regional languages
Time zonesUTC (Danmarkshavn, Greenland) to
UTC -10:00 (west Aleutians)
Largest cities
UN M.49 code021 – Northern America
003 – North America
019 – Americas
001 – World

Northern America is the northernmost region of North America. The boundaries may be drawn slightly differently. In one definition, it lies directly north of Middle America (Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America).[1] Northern America's land frontier with the rest of North America then coincides with the Mexico–United States border. Geopolitically, according to the United Nations' scheme of geographic regions and subregions, Northern America consists of Bermuda, Canada, Greenland, Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, and the United States of America (excluding Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the United States Virgin Islands and other minor US territories).[2][3]

Definitions

Maps using the term Northern America date back to 1755, when the region was occupied by France, Great Britain, and Spain.[4] The Solemn Act of the Declaration of Independence of Northern America in 1813 applied to Mexico. Today, Northern America includes the Canada–US dyad, developed countries that exhibit very high Human Development Indexes and intense economic integration while sharing many socioeconomic characteristics.[5]

The World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions has "Northern America" as the seventh of its nine "botanical continents". Its definition differs from the usual political one: Mexico is included, Bermuda is excluded (being placed in the Caribbean region), Hawaii is excluded (being placed in the Pacific botanical continent) and all of the Aleutian Islands, Russian as well as American, are included.[6]