Compare · The Sahara vs the United States
The Sahara vs the United States
It depends where the desert stops. The Sahara on this map, the dry ecoregion, is 7,216,796 km² — 76 per cent of the United States (9,439,564 km²) and 94 per cent of Australia. The climatic Sahara, the figure encyclopaedias quote, is about 9.2 million km², the same weight class as the United States.
The outline you can drag is the tighter one: eight ecoregions, stopping where the desert grades into the Sahel. The 9.2 million figure counts the whole arid belt from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. Neither reading is a patch of sand at the top of the continent.
The Sahara ecoregion and the United States on Equal Earth. This is the 7.2 million km² outline, not the wider 9.2 million climatic desert. Open this scene on the full map.
Areas are the shapes drawn on Map Real Size, measured on the sphere. Official land-area tables differ where they include inland water, a different coastline, or a disputed border. Why both Sahara numbers are honest.