Country · Antarctic
Antarctica
Antarctica is a country in Antarctic. About 1 106 people live there, in an area of 14 000 000 square kilometres.
Picture credit: Michelle Maria (CC BY 3.0) · NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (CC BY 2.0) · mike (CC BY-SA 2.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where is Antarctica?
Antarctica lies in Antarctic, on the continent of Antarctic.
It sits in the southern half of the world, roughly 10 019 km from the equator.
Its coastline is about 17 968 km long.
It has no land neighbours — every border it has is with the sea.
How big is Antarctica?
Antarctica covers 14 000 000 square kilometres.
That is about 14 times the size of Egypt.
Who lives in Antarctica?
About 1 106 people live in Antarctica.
The land of Antarctica
The land in Antarctica sits on average 2 300 metres above sea level — high enough that much of it counts as mountain country.
Its coast runs for about 17 968 km. Walking it end to end, at twenty kilometres a day, would take roughly 898 days.
It lies inside the polar circle, which is the single biggest reason its weather is the way it is.
What makes Antarctica different?
Websites from here often end in .aq.
Antarctica and the rest of the world
Out of every thousand people alive on Earth, about 0 live in Antarctica.
It takes up about 10.5 % of all the land that countries stand on.
A country, or a territory?
Antarctica is not an independent country but a territory. It has its own name, its own borders and often its own laws, but another country speaks for it abroad — it holds no seat of its own at the United Nations, for instance.
That is more common than it sounds. There are dozens of such places around the world: some sit far from the country they belong to, some right beside it. A few govern themselves almost completely and hand over only defence and foreign policy; others are held more closely. How much a territory decides for itself is settled case by case, never by one rule.
On this site territories get a page of their own, because children look them up and because other pages link to them. They are left out of the record lists, though: those rank only members of the United Nations, so that a ranking never mixes countries with places belonging to somebody else.
Nature and animals
Of the animals on this site, 2 live wild in Antarctica: Emperor penguin and Blue whale. The highest mountain we cover here is Vinson Massif, at 4 892 metres.
Photographs from Wikimedia Commons under free licences — every credit is on the page itself and in the picture credits.
Questions children ask
How many people live in Antarctica?
About 1 106 people live in Antarctica. (Source: World Bank, 2018.)
How big is Antarctica?
Antarctica covers 14 000 000 square kilometres. That is about 14 times the size of Egypt.
Which continent is Antarctica in?
Antarctica is in Antarctic.
Where these numbers come from
Borders and outlines: Natural Earth. Names, capitals, areas, languages and currencies: ISO 3166 data (world-countries). Population: World Bank, 2018. Every derived figure on this page (ranks, density, distance from the equator) is calculated from those values.
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