This polygon shapefile depicts land areas, including major islands and with scale ranking. Data wa derived from 10m coastline. Continental polygons are broken into smaller, contiguous pieces to avoid having too many points in any one polygon, facilitating faster data processing in certain software applications.Coastline accuracy is suspect for northern Russia and southern Chile. These data are represented at 1:10,000,000 scale. This layer is part of the Natural Earth Collection (v.2.0.0). Natural Earth is a public domain map dataset available at 1:10, 1:50 and 1:110 million scales. Featuring tightly integrated vector and raster data, with Natural Earth you can make a variety of visually pleasing, well-crafted maps with cartography or GIS software.