Deserts, found on every continent, are mainly characterized by extremely low precipitation. A recent infographic lists the ten most imposing deserts on our planet.
What is a Desert?
Before exploring the world’s largest deserts, it is important to provide a definition of the term “desert.” Broadly speaking, deserts are environments where extreme aridity prevails. They experience very low precipitation, typically less than 250 mm of rain per year. In addition, evapotranspiration—the amount of water that evaporates into the air and that the sparse plants release—rises well above the amount of water drawn from precipitation. In other words, the soil is never truly able to store surface moisture.
On May 16, 2026, the media Visual Capitalist published an infographic listing the ten largest deserts on Earth (see at the end of the article). The document relies on data from WorldAtlas, one of the oldest and most important educational websites dealing with geography, cartography and demography, among other topics.
Antarctica and the Arctic at the Top of the Ranking
While the most famous desert in the world is undoubtedly the Sahara, it is not the largest on the globe. Indeed, the first place goes to Antarctica, covering an area of more than 14.2 million square kilometers. In reality, the region encompasses not only the continent but also the attached islands and the vast floating ice shelves extending this same continent. It is worth noting that in winter, the freezing of the Southern Ocean (forming the sea ice) doubles the frozen surface, temporarily reaching nearly 30 million square kilometers.
Coming next is the Arctic, with an area of 13.9 million square kilometers. It is a zone that includes all land and marine spaces located mostly above the Arctic Circle. The Arctic Desert differs from the Antarctic in that it is primarily a frozen ocean (ice) surrounded by fragments of continents. These “fragments” are the following: the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, Greenland, the coasts of northern Siberia and the archipelago of Novaya Zemlya and Franz Josef Land, northern Alaska, as well as part of Europe—the Svalbard archipelago and the northern tips of Sweden, Finland and Iceland.
The Sahara, Only Third Place
More in line with the public’s image of a desert, the Sahara ranks third. It covers an area of about 9 million square kilometers, spanning across more than a dozen countries including Algeria, Egypt, Mali, Mauritania, and Chad. It is, of course, the largest hot desert in the world.
In fourth place, we find the Arabian Desert with 2.6 million square kilometers. It lies in the Middle East, including countries such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq and Yemen. Next comes the Gobi Desert (5th), twice as large with 1.3 million square kilometers, straddling China and Mongolia.
Finally, the deserts completing the Top 10 worldwide have areas ranging from 500,000 to 700,000 km². Notable examples include the Patagonia Desert (Argentina), the Great Victoria Desert (Australia), the Kalahari Desert (South Africa, Botswana and Namibia), the Great Basin Desert (United States) and the Syrian Desert.
Here is the infographic published by Visual Capitalist :
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