A map of height above sea level for the whole planet, sharp from the scale of continents down to single valleys, with the world's peaks and cities coloured by how high they stand. How much of the land is mountain, which countries sit highest, and how high do people really live?
Ask how high a place is and you are asking how far it stands above a sea that is not there. Height above sea level shapes almost everything: where rain falls and snow lies, what grows, how hard it is to breathe, where rivers run and where people have chosen to build. Yet most maps flatten it into a few brown smudges. So I wanted one map of the whole planet's height that stays sharp whether you are looking at a continent or a single valley, and a set of plain answers to plain questions. How much of the land is really mountainous? Which countries stand highest? How high do people actually live?
The map below is drawn in your browser from the open terrain tiles first built by Mapzen and now hosted by Amazon, which stitch together the space shuttle's SRTM survey, the global GMTED2010 and ETOPO1 models and national surveys from the United States to New Zealand. Every pixel is a height in metres. The page turns those heights into colour and shading as you go, so you can zoom from the Tibetan Plateau to a hill in your own county, and click anywhere to read its height. For the numbers I used the same tiles at their coarsest level, a world grid of 4,096 by 4,096 cells, about 9.8 km across at the equator, with every cell weighted by its true area.
Line up every square kilometre of land from the highest to the lowest and you get a hypsometric curve, the oldest and simplest picture of a planet's relief. It is surprisingly flat. The average height of the world's land is 807 m, but half of it lies below 432 m. Only 26% is more than 1,000 m up, 11% more than 2,000 m, 5% more than 3,000 m and 0.5% more than 5,000 m.
How much of the world's land is above each height
Share of land area higher than each height, from the zoom 4 terrain grid weighted by true cell area. Lakes are left out; ice sheets count at their surface. Hover for values.
Antarctica changes the picture more than any mountain range. Its ice sheet is a dome 2,208 m high on average over 12.2 million km², so 61% of the continent stands above 2,000 m. Take it away and the rest of the world's land averages 678 m, with 6.5% above 2,000 m and 21% above 1,000 m. Take away Greenland's ice too and the average drops to 660 m.
Seen against the whole Earth, land is a thin crust on a mostly drowned planet: 30% of the surface stands above sea level, and the sea floor lies on average 3,713 m down, more than four times deeper than the land is high.
The whole Earth, from the deepest trench to the highest peak
Share of the Earth's surface above each height, land and sea floor together. The terrain tiles give the sea floor too (from ETOPO1 and other bathymetry); the polar caps beyond 85° come from ETOPO10.
By continent, Antarctica is the highest by far (2,208 m on average, all of it ice), then Asia (1,059 m), which holds the Tibetan Plateau, the Himalaya and the Pamirs. North America comes next (740 m, lifted by Greenland's ice and the Rockies), then Africa (629 m, a continent of high plateaus with few great peaks), South America (587 m), Europe (370 m) and Oceania (301 m). Asia stands on average 2.9 times as high as Europe.
Average height of the land, by continent
Mean height of land, metres, with the share above 2,000 m. Continents as Natural Earth draws them (Indonesia, including its half of New Guinea, counts as Asia).
The highest countries on average are the mountain states of central Asia: Tajikistan (2,961 m), Bhutan (2,763 m) and Kyrgyzstan (2,683 m). Africa's highest is Lesotho (2,218 m), the 'kingdom in the sky', where even the lowest 10 km cell is 1,454 m up. At the other end, the Netherlands averages 10 m, below even Bangladesh (28 m) and Denmark (30 m). The United Kingdom averages 158 m and Switzerland 1,334 m.
Highest countries
Mean height of land, metres. Click a bar to see it on the map.
Lowest countries
Mean height of land, metres.
A caution on small places. At 9.8 km, a cell can hold a whole valley, so heights are smoothed: the highest cell in the grid, on the flank of Everest, is 6,727 m, 2,122 m short of the summit. Countries smaller than about a hundred cells are only roughly resolved, and the ranking above includes only the 161 countries that cover at least a hundred. Andorra, for instance, would rank among the highest of all, but it covers fewer than ten cells. The full table has every country, with small ones marked.
Mean and highest 10 km cell from the zoom 4 grid. Highest peak: the highest summit in the open data within the country (or on its border); 'confirmed' when it matches an independent list of national high points. Small countries (fewer than 100 cells) in grey.
For the peaks I took every mountain, hill, summit and volcano in Wikidata with a height: 136,410 items. Wikidata records each height's unit, so the 3,057 heights given in feet, most of them American and British, convert cleanly to metres. I still checked every height against the terrain around its point: a summit can rise well above the 10 km average around it, but not three times the local relief. That caught 18 heights entered with the wrong unit and 15 given in kilometres, and dropped 1,845 items, most of them without coordinates or with a height that fitted nothing, leaving 134,657 summits on the map. Natural Earth and Wikipedia's list of the most prominent summits added only 89 and 3 summits that Wikidata lacked.
The highest peak of each continent
Metres above sea level. Continents as Natural Earth draws them, so Oceania's highest is Mount Wilhelm in Papua New Guinea; Puncak Jaya (4,884 m), the highest on New Guinea, falls in Indonesia and so in Asia.
Height is only one way to measure a mountain. Prominence asks how far you would have to descend from a summit before climbing anything higher, which picks out the great stand-alone mountains. Everest's prominence is its full height. Then come Aconcagua (6,961 m), Denali (6,155 m) and Mount Kilimanjaro (5,885 m), and the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia, whose Pico Cristóbal Colón rises 5,529 m from the Caribbean coast. K2, the second highest mountain, is only 22nd by prominence, because it shares its base with the rest of the Karakoram.
The most prominent peaks
Height (pale) and prominence (dark), metres. From English Wikipedia's list of peaks by prominence. Click a peak to fly there.
For the highest point of each country I took the highest summit in the cleaned data within a kilometre of its territory, then checked it against an independent list of national high points. They agree for 189 of the 215 countries in both; where they do not, Wikidata usually lacks the true summit or gives it a different height (Jabal Ferwa for Saudi Arabia, Shimbiris for Somalia), so the table shows only the confirmed ones. 25 countries have a confirmed high point above 5,000 m.
People do not live where the land is. Wikidata gives a height and a population for 4,325 cities of 50,000 or more, holding 2.6 billion people between them. Half of those people live below 92 m. While 26% of the world's land is above 1,000 m, only 10.3% of the cities' people live that high, and only 1.9% above 2,000 m, against 11% of the land: 5.7 times less, or 3.4 times less leaving uninhabited Antarctica aside.
Land and city people, by height
Share of the world's land (pale) and of the population of listed cities (dark) in each height band. Land excludes lakes; cities are Wikidata places of 50,000 or more with a height.
The exceptions are spectacular. Among cities of a million or more, the highest is Quito at 2,850 m, and the biggest above 2,000 m are Mexico City (2,240 m), Bogotá (2,582 m) and Addis Ababa (2,355 m). Among those of 100,000 or more, El Alto in Bolivia stands at 4,150 m and Potosí at 4,070 m. La Paz, seat of Bolivia's government, is the highest capital at 3,640 m. In all, 92 of the listed cities are above 2,000 m and 18 above 3,000 m.
The highest cities of a million or more
Height above sea level from Wikidata, metres. Chinese prefecture-level 'cities', whose Wikidata populations include the countryside around them, are ranked only if Natural Earth gives their urban area a million people or more, and are shown with that figure (84 left out, among them Lijiang and Zhaotong).
11% of the world's land is above 2,000 m. 1.9% of its city dwellers are.
A little land lies below the sea's level, kept dry by deserts or dykes. On the 9.8 km grid the named depressions add up to 355,893 km², and 76% of that is the plain around the Caspian Sea, where Baku, 28 m below sea level, is the lowest city of 100,000 or more in the data. Then come Egypt's Qattara Depression (22,007 km²), the salt pan of Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre in Australia (13,474 km²), the polders of the Netherlands (11,300 km²) and the Afar and Danakil depression in Ethiopia and Djibouti (8,920 km²). The Dead Sea, the lowest land on Earth, shows as a narrow trench reaching 478 m below sea level, and Death Valley as a handful of cells.
Land below sea level, by depression
Area of wholly-land 10 km cells below 0 m, km², with the lowest cell. Lakes, coastal cells, Antarctica and Greenland left out. Click to fly there.
These are approximate. A 10 km cell averages the depths of a depression with the ground around it, so small, deep places such as the Dead Sea's shore, Lake Assal in Djibouti or Death Valley's Badwater Basin look shallower and smaller than they are. The grid also finds another 89,568 km² of patches below 0 m on deltas and coastal flats, from the Po and the Danube to the Nile, which are partly real and partly the sea's depths bleeding into coastal cells; I leave them out of the total.
Terrain. The AWS Terrain Tiles are a global mosaic made by Mapzen in 2016 to 2017 and kept as an open dataset on Amazon. Each tile is a PNG whose colours encode height: height in metres = red × 256 + green + blue / 256 − 32,768. The detail differs by place: on land roughly 30 m (SRTM and national surveys) where available, coarser in polar regions and at sea. The page decodes them on the fly; colours, shading (light from the north-west, with vertical exaggeration that grows as you zoom out) and height steps are computed in your browser. Clicking reads the height from a detailed tile, at zoom 12 or finer, where a pixel is about 40 m across or less.
Statistics. All the shares and averages come from the 4,096 × 4,096 grid at zoom 4, about 9.8 km at the equator and 4.9 km at 60°, in Web Mercator. Each cell is weighted by its true area on the globe. Land is Natural Earth's 1:10m countries less its lakes and reservoirs, rasterised at twice the grid's resolution so coastal cells count by their share of land. Coastal cells mix land and sea floor, so they are floored at 0 m; only wholly-land cells can be below sea level. Web Mercator stops at 85.05°, so Antarctica south of that line comes from ETOPO10, a 10 arc minute version of ETOPO1. 13 corrupt cells (one claiming 11,500 m on Baffin Island) were replaced by the median of their neighbours. Ice counts at its surface.
Peaks. Wikidata mountains, hills, summits and volcanoes (161,049 rows, 136,410 items), using the height Wikidata normalises to metres from each item's preferred statement, with 89 summits added from Natural Earth's elevation points and 3 from Wikipedia's list of peaks by prominence, which also gives the prominence ranking. Each height is tested against the highest and lowest 10 km cells within two cells of the point. Heights that only fit as feet or kilometres (a wrong unit in Wikidata) were converted; those that fit nothing were dropped, as were summits higher than the confirmed high point of the country they stand in. The independent list of national high points (from peakbagger.com, used only as a check and not republished) confirms 189 countries' high points.
Cities. Wikidata cities of 50,000 or more with a height and a population; duplicates merged, metropolitan areas, provinces and districts left out so people are not counted twice, and each height checked against the terrain in the same way. Wikidata's populations are of varying date and definition, and Chinese prefecture-level cities include large rural areas, which inflates China's share of high cities such as Zhaotong or Bijie; in the ranking of cities of a million or more, a Chinese city counts only if Natural Earth gives its urban area a million or more.
What this cannot say. The statistics are smoothed to about 10 km, so they understate peaks and narrow valleys and say little about tiny countries. Sea level itself is a reference surface, not a level the sea actually reaches everywhere; the tiles use mean sea level (the EGM96 geoid for SRTM). Mountain heights in Wikidata and Wikipedia come from many surveys of different ages, and Wikidata lists subsidiary tops (Everest's South Summit, for instance) as items of their own, so the map shows them alongside the main summits.