How big is Antarctica?
About 14.2 million km², which makes it larger than every country on Earth except Russia — and Russia only beats it by a fifth. Canada and the United States are each around seven tenths of it. It is bigger than Europe, bigger than Oceania, and smaller only than Asia, Africa, North America and South America. Most people place it far lower than that, because most people have only ever seen it on a projection that cannot draw it.
Why is Antarctica so hard to picture?
Mercator sends the poles to infinity, so on the world map hanging in most classrooms Antarctica is not a shape at all — it is a white band smeared along the bottom edge, with no boundary you could trace and no area you could judge. The continent everyone has seen most often is the one nobody has seen. Drawn equal-area at the same scale as everything else, it stops being a border decoration and becomes the fourth-largest continent, which is what it has been the whole time.
Does Antarctica include the ice shelves?
That depends who is counting, and it is the reason this page's outline needs the largest correction on the site. A coastline encloses the grounded ice sheet, about 12.2 million km². The published 14.2 million counts the floating Ross and Ronne-Filchner shelves as well — ice that is part of the continent by convention but sits on water, so no coastline polygon contains it. The gap is roughly 2 million km² — almost exactly the size of Mexico — and it is a disagreement about the definition rather than an error in either number.
Is Antarctica bigger than Europe?
Yes, by about 40%. Antarctica is roughly 14.2 million km² against Europe's 10.2 million, so Europe fits inside it with a Greenland to spare. This is the comparison people get wrong most often, and the projection is only half the reason: the other half is that Europe is drawn at the centre of the map with every border and city labelled, while Antarctica is drawn at the edge with nothing on it at all.
Every figure on this page
| Unit | Area (km²) | Share of land | Outline vs figure |
|---|---|---|---|
| South America | 17,840,000 | 11.9% | +0.1% |
| Russia | 17,098,246 | 11.4% | +1.0% |
| Antarctica | 14,200,000 | 9.4% | +16.0% |
| Europe | 10,180,000 | 6.8% | +2.7% |
| Canada | 9,984,670 | 6.6% | +0.0% |
| United States of America | 9,833,517 | 6.5% | +3.6% |
| China | 9,596,961 | 6.4% | +2.0% |
| Oceania | 8,600,000 | 5.7% | +0.9% |
| Brazil | 8,515,767 | 5.7% | -0.3% |
| Australia | 7,692,024 | 5.1% | -0.1% |
| India | 3,287,263 | 2.2% | +4.3% |
| Greenland | 2,166,086 | 1.4% | -1.1% |
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.