Basic Facts About Africa

1.  Africa is the 2nd largest continent in the world, with about 30,300,000 square kilometers of land mass (or 11 million 700 thousand square miles)

2.  Mt Kilimanjaro is the continent’s highest peak.

3.  The climate and vegetation in Africa varies considerably from the arid desert of the Sahara to the tropical rain-forests of the Congo basin.

4.  The principle rivers in Africa are the Nile, the Niger, the Congo, and the Zambezi.

Fun facts:  It’s raining African Dust!

You may not have to go as far as you think to get a little piece of Africa.  Fine African dust is swept up by the wind and carried far away — more than 6,400 kilometers across the ocean.  It lands in places like the Amazon (as much as 40 million metric tons of African dust refresh the Amazon each year), and is carried over much of the southern and Eastern United States.  Scientists say that Africa is responsible for 75 % to 80% of the dust that falls in Florida, and residents there often clean the residue of reddish particles from their cars, which is dust that has made its way from Africa. So when you walk across an island of the Bahamas or the Florida Keys, you’ll be hiking on African soil!

Related Activity:
Collect a tub of fine dirt or sand (colored art sand works best) and some straws. Bring it outside, and give each kid a straw and a small handful of dirt. Place the dirt on a sidewalk, and have them use their straws to try to blow their clump of sand across the sidewalk to other places, making unique patterns as you do so.

The Vast Expanse of Africa

Africa gets a bum rap on maps. Because of the way a flat map is drawn to display the curvature of the earth through a formula known as the Mercator Projection, some land masses get drawn bigger in proportion to others.  So what’s the true size of Africa? Pretty big! You could fit China, India, the continental United States, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, the U.K., and Japan into the continent with plenty of room left over.