If looking for the biggest desert in the world, you might be
surprised by the result. You probably first thought that Sahara
occupies the top position, but in that case you’re wrong! Let’s
start from precise definition of a desert, which says it is a
surface which gets very little rainfall (not more than 260 mm
during the whole year). A bit over one third of the Earth’s
landscape belongs to desert areas. The biggest desert in the
world is actually Antarctica. It is classified as desert because
it does not get more than two inches or 5 centimeters of
precipitation a year. This polar desert is 55.4 million square
miles or 14 million square kilometers big. The second place when
measuring desert surfaces on Earth belongs to another polar
desert – Arctic. It spreads over Russia, Greenland, Alaska,
Iceland and Canada. Finally, position number three on the
biggest desert list goes to non-polar desert Sahara in northern
Africa. Its surface stretches over 9 million square kilometers
(or 3.6 million square miles) which