Largest Deserts in the World

About This Dataset

The world's largest desert regions ranked by total area in square kilometres. Contrary to popular belief, Antarctica is the world's largest desert — its interior receives less than 50mm of precipitation per year, qualifying it as a cold desert larger than the Sahara.

✨ AI Insight

The stark contrast between the Antarctic and Arctic Deserts, both exceeding 13 million km², highlights the unique classification of cold deserts, which defies common perceptions of deserts as hot and arid. The Sahara, while significantly smaller at 9.2 million km², remains the largest hot desert, showcasing the diversity of desert climates. Other notable deserts like the Arabian and Gobi are much smaller, with areas of 2,330,000 km² and 1,300,000 km² respectively. This data underscores the importance of understanding desert environments beyond temperature, as both the Antarctic and Arctic play crucial roles in global climate regulation.

Source: Wikipedia

Key Findings

Auto-computed highlights from this dataset

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Antarctic Desert leads with 14,200,000 in All Time.

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Average value in All Time: 5,346,250 · median: 1,815,000.

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Gap in All Time: Antarctic Desert is 27.3× larger than Syrian Desert.

Largest Deserts in the World

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Data Insights Below

Data Insights

Numbers, trends & sources behind this chart

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Data Points

8 categories · 1 year

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Top Value

14,200,000

Antarctic Desert

Area (km²) · All Time

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Metrics

Area (km²)

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Period

All Time

Single year snapshot

Rankings & Full Data

8 records · Area (km²) · ranked by All Time

✓ 8 sourced

#	Category	All Time
🥇	Antarctic Desert	14,200,000
🥈	Arctic Desert	13,900,000
🥉	Sahara Desert	9,200,000
4	Arabian Desert	2,330,000
5	Gobi Desert	1,300,000
6	Patagonian Desert	673,000
7	Great Victoria Desert	647,000
8	Syrian Desert	520,000