How many continents are there?
Between four and seven, depending on where you went to school. The count is a teaching convention rather than a measurement: Europe and Asia sit on one landmass with no ocean between them, and the dividing line along the Urals is cultural and roughly 2,500 years old. This page draws every model that is actually taught and lets you switch between them.
Why do the models disagree?
Because every boundary in the list is a decision rather than a discovery. The division itself is ancient — Greek geographers were separating Europe from Asia 2,500 years ago — but the line along the Urals is much younger: it was proposed in 1730 by a Swedish officer, Philip Johan von Strahlenberg, and it held because it was administratively convenient. Nothing in the geology, the drainage or the coastline marks it, and the two sit on one uninterrupted landmass, which is why Eurasia appears here as a single unit in the models that admit it.
The other joins work the same way. The Americas are continuous except where the Panama Canal cuts them, so much of Latin America and continental Europe teaches one America where the English-speaking world teaches two. Afro-Eurasia treats the Suez isthmus exactly as the seven-continent model treats the Urals — a narrow neck that counts as a boundary if you want one. Antarctica is the only unit every model agrees on, and also the only one with no permanent population to disagree about it.
Which continent is the largest?
Asia, at about 44.6 million km², by a margin nothing else in the list approaches: it is larger than Africa and Europe put together. Below it the order runs Africa at 30.4, North America at 24.7, South America at 17.8, Antarctica at 14.2, Europe at 10.2 and Oceania at 8.6. Antarctica outranking Europe is the one most people get wrong, which is no surprise given that Mercator cannot draw Antarctica at all — the projection sends the poles to infinity, so it arrives as a smear along the bottom edge.
Every figure on this page
| Unit | Area (km²) | Share of land | Outline vs figure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Afro-Eurasia | 85,129,000 | 56.6% | +1.0% |
| Eurasia | 54,759,000 | 36.4% | +1.0% |
| Asia | 44,579,000 | 29.6% | +0.7% |
| America | 42,549,000 | 28.3% | +0.8% |
| Africa | 30,370,000 | 20.2% | +1.1% |
| North America | 24,709,000 | 16.4% | +1.2% |
| South America | 17,840,000 | 11.9% | +0.1% |
| Antarctica | 14,200,000 | 9.4% | +16.0% |
| Europe | 10,180,000 | 6.8% | +2.7% |
| Oceania | 8,600,000 | 5.7% | +0.9% |
Why do world maps show the wrong sizes?
Mercator-style world maps distort area badly, which is why Greenland is usually drawn about the size of Africa when it is closer to one fourteenth of it. Every outline on this page is projected with Lambert Azimuthal Equal-Area, centred on its own centroid, and every layer shares one kilometre-to-screen scale. Area on screen is therefore proportional to real area: what looks bigger is bigger. Each outline is scaled by a small fit factor so its drawn area matches the published figure, and that geometry is checked against those figures automatically.
Why does the outline disagree with the figure?
The last column is the gap between the two numbers behind every slab. The outline comes from Natural Earth's 110m coastline; the area is the published figure that outline is drawn to. They rarely match, so each shape is scaled by a small factor until its drawn area equals the published one — and that factor is what the column reports.
Most of the gap is coarseness: a 110m coastline cuts corners, and cutting corners loses area. That accounts for the small positive numbers, and it is why almost everything here needs nudging up. Seven shapes go the other way and are drawn slightly too large, which the same correction shrinks. Two cases are not coarseness at all. Antarctica's 16% is a definition: the coastline encloses the grounded ice sheet, about 12.2 million km², while the published 14.2 million counts the floating Ross and Ronne-Filchner shelves, which no coastline encloses. India's 4.3% is Kashmir — Natural Earth assigns Gilgit-Baltistan and Azad Kashmir to Pakistan, and the published Indian figure includes them.
For the rest, the honest answer is that this page does not know. Saudi Arabia's 11.7% is the largest gap among the countries and no specific cause is claimed for it here. The column is published rather than hidden because a correction applied silently is the kind of thing that stops being questioned.
How to use it
Drag to orbit the stack. Scroll or pinch in to peel down through it one layer at a time, digging from the smallest continent to the largest. Click any name, in the legend or on a label, to hide that layer. The comparison panel re-expresses every area as a multiple of whichever layer you have surfaced. Nothing to install, and it works offline.
Outlines from Natural Earth 110m. Areas cross-checked against published figures. Contested boundaries (Siberia, Sinai, Thrace, Kazakhstan) are stated rather than hidden, with the cost of each decision documented. The projection is Lambert Azimuthal Equal-Area, computed per landmass about its own centroid.