Who knew Antarctica was soooo fucking big!!!!

Why??

You will notice a lot of that is ice over water, where you can see the actual shorelines as raised half-oval areas where there are bays, but it is a pretty big land mass.. Russia/Asia is pretty comparable..

But hey, if the planet gets hot enough, we'd need that space as antartica would be the only livable place left, the rest being deserts

5.5M square miles. it's about 60% the size of north america 9.5M sq miles.

what's the big deal??

op doesn't understand about projection in relation to maps.


school system fail

not if your remove the ice, it's all islands and lakes

Africa is twice the size of Antarctica, they just use that stretch for globes to fill it out, just like the North to make it more filled out and presentable.

For comparison between

Antartica

Area
14,200,000 km2
5,500,000 sq m

Africa

Area
30,370,000 km2
11,730,000 sq mi

Alaska

Area
7,692,024 km2
2,969,907 sq mi

So in reality think of Antarctica is actually twice the size as Australia with about the same amount of nothing except all those underground bases.

Antarctica? never heard of it. Where is it?

Go to Google Earth, Op. Zoom out and spin the globe around. That’s about how it compares.

Penguins?

No, this place is HALF the size of Africa- I just laid out the dimensions FFS

Scot?

I think the early explorer who sailed something like thirty thousand miles around it probably thought so.

He didn't realize he was sailing around the outside of a flat Earth.

Does not make sense the size compared to other continents looking at this map, then looking at it on a globe??

[link to eclipsewise.com]

And why do you not see any pictures of Antarctica in Space when they show the Earth from Space "supposedly"??

None that I can find...

That's a Mercator projection.

If you can imagine a sphere pulled out horizontally at both ends to form a cylinder, that's what a Mercator projection is.

It makes the size distort everything the further it is away from the equator.

Because that type of spacecraft is not usually put in a polar orbit.

Greenland should fit into Africa 14 times in reality. That map is a projection that greatly exaggerates the land size in the far North and south. Truth be told we don’t really have an accurate map of the world.

[link to space.stackexchange.com (secure)]

I said Google EARTH. Not Google Maps. Looks about about half the size of the continent of Africa on Google Earth globe view. Like you said. FFS.

I've always remembered it on a Globe smaller than Australia, now it looks like you can fit almost all the Continents on the planet in it??!! just blows my mind!!

Germans and Na zi's Sure did :-)

Neuschwabenland

[link to www.coolantarctica.com (secure)]

And

[link to en.wikipedia.org (secure)]

:-)

May God Bless You

You can fly over it and there’s land on the other side.

Probably.

What is antarctica doing there on bottom of the earth all by itself?