Eastern Hemisphere

The Eastern Hemisphere is the half of the planet Earth which is east of the prime meridian (which crosses Greenwich, London, United Kingdom) and west of the antimeridian (which crosses the Pacific Ocean and relatively little land from pole to pole). It is also used to refer to Afro-Eurasia (Africa and Eurasia) and Australia, in contrast with the Western Hemisphere, which includes mainly North and South America. The Eastern Hemisphere may also be called the "Oriental Hemisphere", and may in addition be used in a cultural or geopolitical sense as a synonym for the European term, "Old World".

Geography

The boundary line between the Western and Eastern Hemispheres is an almost perfect circle (the Earth is an oblate spheroid, i.e. wider around the equator). The position of this boundary line must be an arbitrary convention, unlike the equator (an imaginary line encircling Earth, equidistant from its poles, which divides the Northern and Southern hemispheres). The prime meridian at 0° longitude and the antimeridian, at 180° longitude, are the conventionally accepted boundaries, since they divide eastern longitudes from western longitudes. This convention was established in 1884 at the International Meridian Conference held in Washington, D.C., where the standard time concepts of Canadian railroad engineer Sir Sandford Fleming were adopted. The hemispheres agreed do not precisely correspond with continents. Portions of Western Europe, West Africa, Oceania, and extreme northeastern Russia are in the Western Hemisphere, in contrast to the split between the "Old World" and the "New World" or the Americas.