Greenland vs Antarctica size comparison

Every way to compare Greenland and Antarctica

Size depends on what you count. Total area includes lakes, rivers and coastal water; land area leaves them out. Every row below uses the same published sources.

How much bigger is Antarctica than Greenland?

Antarctica covers 5,482,651 sq mi (14,200,000 sq km). Greenland covers 836,330 sq mi (2,166,086 sq km). That makes Antarctica 6.56 times the size of Greenland, or 556 percent larger. Put the other way, Greenland is 15 percent of the size of Antarctica, and about 6.6 copies of Greenland would fit inside it.

The difference is 12,033,914 sq km (4,646,320 sq mi).

Why the two look different on most world maps

Web maps and many classroom maps use the Mercator projection, which keeps shapes and directions true but enlarges areas away from the equator. The enlargement grows with latitude: an area at latitude φ is drawn about 1 / cos²(φ) times its size compared with the same area at the equator.

Antarctica is centered so close to a pole that a Mercator map cannot show it properly at all: the projection stretches areas without limit toward the poles, and most Mercator maps cut off around 85°.

The outlines at the top of this page use a Lambert azimuthal equal-area projection centered on each shape, so their drawn areas compare the same way as the published figures. To drag any country across a map yourself, use the country size comparison tool.

More about Greenland and Antarctica

Both are almost all ice. Antarctica has about 285,000 sq km free of ice and Greenland roughly 456,000 sq km, the Factbook total minus its ice-covered area.

Antarctica's area is an estimate rounded to 14.2 million sq km, partly because much of its coast is floating ice shelf whose edge moves.

Sources and definitions

Greenland: 2,166,086 sq km total, from the CIA World Factbook. About 1,710,000 sq km, roughly four fifths, is under the ice sheet (Factbook).

Antarctica: 14,200,000 sq km total, from the CIA World Factbook. Factbook estimate, rounded to 14.2 million sq km. Only about 285,000 sq km is free of ice. No permanent population.

The CIA stopped publishing the World Factbook in February 2026. Figures here come from its final edition, read from a public mirror of the data, and will not change unless another official source replaces them. Outlines come from Natural Earth (via world-atlas) and Census cartographic boundary files, and are simplified for drawing; the numbers never come from the outlines.