Antarctica 🇦🇶

Antarctica is one of the territories of the Antarctic that appears on world lists without being a UN member state. Unlike most entries, its formal name adds nothing to the short one. It has no capital city listed, which is normal for an entry of this kind.

Its recorded population is just 1,000, among the smallest anywhere. Among the 5 entries in the Antarctic it ranks 1st by area and 1st by population.

It covers 14,000,000 km², which ranks it 2nd of the 250 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Russia and just ahead of Canada. Put next to a territory most people can picture, it is around a fifth smaller than Russia.

Antarctica does not hold a United Nations seat of its own. It is administered as a dependency or overseas territory rather than as a sovereign state, which is why it sits outside the 193 member states while still appearing among the 250 entries on this site.

Antarctica holds 2 of the five markers of separate administration tracked here, but not all of them: it has no currency, dialling code and capital of its own. That mix is typical of a territory that manages some functions locally and leaves others to the state that administers it.

• Its own currencynone listed
• Its own dialling codenone listed
• Its own internet domain.aq
• Its own ISO codesaq / ATA
• A designated capitalnone listed

Plotted on a globe it falls at 90.0° south, 0.0° east, which puts it in the southern hemisphere, roughly 10,019 km from the equator, in what geographers would call polar latitudes.

The prime meridian also passes close to it, so it straddles the line that divides east from west.

It shares no land border with anyone. That puts it among the 85 entries of 250 here with no land neighbours, a group made up mostly of islands and island groups.

Antarctica has no land border with any country, which changes what "nearby" means. Measured centre to centre in a straight line, the closest other entry on this site is South Georgia, roughly 3,900 km away. These are approximate distances between representative points, not the shortest crossing between two shorelines, so treat them as a sense of scale rather than a sailing chart.

Being surrounded by water rather than by neighbours pushes a country's relationships outward. Falkland Islands sits in a different world region from Antarctica yet ranks among its closest geographic company — the kind of pairing that only shows up once you stop thinking in continents.

No land border also means no land crossing: everything and everyone arrives by sea or by air. That single fact drives a lot of what follows on this page, from how goods reach the shops to why Antarctica's dialling code and internet domain are worth knowing before you travel.

Spread across 14,000,000 km², that works out at about 0.000 people per square kilometre, which makes it one of the emptiest inhabited places on the list. Half the entries in this dataset fall below roughly 90 per square kilometre.

The dataset records no official language for it.

Someone from Antarctica is an Antarctican.

Against the Antarctic as a whole it is the 1st most populous of 5 entries, and it accounts for 75% of everyone living in the Antarctic.

Within Antarctic, Antarctica is the most populous of the 5 entries this site lists, and the largest by area as well. French Southern and Antarctic Lands is next in line by population.

Every entry in Antarctic has its own guide here, so if you want to work through the whole neighbourhood rather than one country at a time, French Southern and Antarctic Lands is the place to carry on.

• 🇹🇫 French Southern and Antarctic Lands
• 🇦🇶 Antarctica

No currency is recorded for it in this dataset.

Its internet country code is .aq. Standard country codes: aq and ATA.

Antarctica is not a UN member state. The dataset does not record which state administers it, so this page does not guess. Of the 250 entries here, 57 are territories or observers rather than member states.