South America: Where extremes meet

The continent is named after Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian explorer whose Latinized first name, Americus, appeared on Martin Waldseemüller's 1507 world map. "South" was added later to separate it from North America, once mapmakers recognized two distinct landmasses joined only by a narrow isthmus.

Yes, South America is one of Earth's seven continents. It sits almost entirely in the Western and Southern Hemispheres, connected to North America only by the narrow Isthmus of Panama, a link too slender for most geographers to treat the two landmasses as a single continent.

South America has 12 sovereign countries, from Brazil and Argentina down to smaller nations like Suriname and Guyana. French Guiana sits on the continent too, but it remains an overseas region of France rather than an independent country, so it is not counted among the 12.

The Andes formed as the oceanic Nazca Plate slid beneath the continental South American Plate, a process called subduction. The pressure buckled and lifted the crust along the entire western coast, and the same collision still drives the volcanoes and earthquakes found there today.

The Atacama sits in a double rain shadow, blocked from Atlantic moisture by the Andes to the east and from Pacific moisture by the cold Humboldt Current to the west. That same current also cools the air just enough to trade rain clouds for fog.