One Scale

How many continents are there?

Every outline is drawn in an equal-area projection at one shared scale — so what looks bigger is bigger. Why maps get sizes wrong Model Spacing 0.70 Fill 0.62 Top view Angled Spin Show all 1000 km grid Zoom peels layers Showing — Controls Legend Compare Hide Scroll in to peel down through the stack · drag to orbit · click a name to hide a layer.

Why do the models disagree?

Because every boundary in the list is a decision rather than a discovery. The division itself is ancient — Greek geographers were separating Europe from Asia 2,500 years ago — but the line along the Urals is much younger: it was proposed in 1730 by a Swedish officer, Philip Johan von Strahlenberg, and it held because it was administratively convenient.

Which continent is the largest?

Asia, at about 44.6 million km², by a margin nothing else in the list approaches: it is larger than Africa and Europe put together. Below it the order runs Africa at 30.4, North America at 24.7, South America at 17.8, Antarctica at 14.2, Europe at 10.2 and Oceania at 8.6.

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.

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.