ATLAS · NATURAL LANDMARKS

The World’s Great Natural Landmarks

The highest places, the driest places, and the most extraordinary. This overlay plots a curated set of the planet’s great natural landmarks over any Atlas map, in three colours: the great peaks— the eight-thousanders and the Seven Summits — in charge-blue; the great deserts in gold; and the natural wonders— waterfalls, canyons, salt flats and karst — in radar-green.

Open the Atlas map & toggle Natural Landmarks on →

On the Atlas canvas, the Natural Landmarks switch sits in the Nature group of the overlays panel. The landmarks draw over whatever metric (or the plain political map) you have up; tap any dot for its name, location and a one-line fact.

Three kinds of landmark

Every dot is one of three kinds, and the colour tells you which — so two stacked together still read apart.

THE GREAT PEAKSThe roof of the world. All fourteen eight-thousanders — the only mountains on Earth that rise above 8,000 metres, every one of them in the Himalaya and Karakoram — from Everest down to Shishapangma. With them, the Seven Summits: the highest point on each continent, from Aconcagua in the Andes to Denali in Alaska, Kilimanjaro in Africa and Vinson in Antarctica.

THE GREAT DESERTSThe world’s great dry lands. The Sahara, the largest hot desert, big enough to swallow the United States; the cold Gobi of Central Asia; the Atacama, the driest place on Earth; the ancient Namib, where dunes meet the Atlantic; and the red deserts of Australia and Arabia. Each is plotted at a representative point — deserts have no crisp edge.

THE NATURAL WONDERSThe planet’s showpieces. The Grand Canyon and Victoria Falls; Uluru and Salar de Uyuni’s mirror of salt; the karst towers of Hạ Long Bay and Zhangjiajie; the basalt columns of the Giant’s Causeway; the travertine terraces of Pamukkale; and the lowest dry land on Earth, the shore of the Dead Sea.

A word on the “largest” deserts

A desert is defined by how little rain or snow falls on it, not by heat or sand — so by the strict definition, the two largest deserts on Earth are the polar deserts: Antarctica, at roughly fourteen million square kilometres, and the Arctic. Both dwarf the Sahara. We leave them off the map — plotting a whole frozen continent as a single dot would mislead more than it teaches — and show instead the great non-polar deserts, which is what most people mean by the word. The areas shown are approximate: deserts shade gradually into the land around them, so any boundary is a judgement call, and the figures are order-of-magnitude, not survey-precise.

Natural Landmarks of the World — The Highest Peaks, the Greatest Deserts, and the Natural Wonders →

About this overlay & its data

This is a curatedset — sixty landmarks, twenty of each kind, chosen and described by the LEV Atlas Desk. A curated list is the honest way to map a small, finite, famous collection like this: trying to harvest it automatically is the wrong tool. (Ask an open database for “every mountain over 8,000 metres” and you get back more than a thousand, because elevations are stored in mixed units and America’s 14,000-foot peaks slip through the net.) The coordinates come from Wikidata(public-domain, CC0) and were checked against it on the build date — the eight-thousanders matched to a hundredth of a degree. Peak heights are the standard published values; desert areas are approximate, for the reason above. There are no per-place pages: a great peak or desert spans borders, and the map is the point.

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