World's Largest Deserts by Area
About This Dataset
World's Largest Deserts by Area
Deserts ranked by total surface area in millions of square kilometres. The Antarctic Desert is the world's largest desert by area at 14.2 million square kilometres — a fact that surprises most people, as the common conception of deserts as hot and sandy excludes the polar deserts, which are defined by extremely low precipitation rather than high temperature. The Sahara is the largest hot desert and third largest overall.
Analysis
Antarctic Desert heads the table on 14.2, ahead of Arctic Desert (13.9) and Sahara (Africa) (9.20) in Area (Million km2). 13.6 separates the highest figure (14.2) from the lowest (0.56) in Area (Million km2). First and second are separated by 0.30, so the leader sits inside the field rather than apart from it. Only 3 of the 8 reach even half the leader's figure (7.10 or more).
Source:
Wikipedia
Key Findings
🏆
Antarctic Desert leads in Area (Million km2) with 14.20.
📊
Average Area (Million km2): 5 · median: 2.
↔️
Gap: Antarctic Desert is 25.4× larger than Kalahari Desert (Africa).
Data Insights
Numbers, trends & sources behind this chart
Methodology & source
- Data source
- Wikipedia
- Coverage
- 8 entities · 8 observations
- Measure
- Area (Million km2)
- Last updated
- 6 September 2026
- Compiled by
- The ANYSTAT team, from the source above
How the figures are calculated
- Values are shown as reported by the source. Nothing is rescaled, rebased or converted — the only changes are thousand separators and decimals shown to two places.
- Entities are ranked highest-first on their value.
Data Sources & References
All external sources cited in this dataset
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