ATLAS · FIELD GUIDE
Natural Landmarks of the World — The Highest Peaks, the Greatest Deserts, and the Natural Wonders
Only fourteen mountains on Earth rise above eight thousand metres, and every one of them is crowded into a single mountain range. The largest desert in the world is not the Sahara. The tallest waterfall drops nearly a kilometre in one leap. What are the world's great natural landmarks, and how do you read them at the scale of a world map?
The highest places on Earth, the driest, and the most extraordinary. This overlay plots a curated set of the world's great natural landmarks over any of the Atlas maps, in three colours — and the colour tells you what kind of landmark each one is. Here is how to read it.
The roof of the world
The blue dots are the great peaks. Two groups make up the set, and they overlap in one famous summit.
The first is the eight-thousanders: the fourteen mountains whose tops break 8,000 metres above the sea. What is striking, when you see them on a world map, is how tightly they cluster — every single one stands in the Himalaya or the adjoining Karakoram, strung along the seam where the Indian tectonic plate is ramming northward into Asia and crumpling the crust upward. That collision is still happening, and the mountains are still rising. Everest is the highest at 8,849 metres; K2, the second, is widely held to be the hardest and most dangerous to climb; Annapurna I, only the tenth-highest, has historically been the deadliest of all.
The second group is the Seven Summits — the highest mountain on each continent. These are scattered across the whole world, not clustered: Aconcagua high in the Andes, Denali in the Alaskan sub-Arctic, the volcanic cone of Kilimanjaro rising alone above the African plains, Elbrus in the Caucasus, Vinson deep in Antarctica, and Puncak Jaya in the equatorial highlands of New Guinea. Everest belongs to both lists at once, the highest of the eight-thousanders and the high point of Asia.
The great deserts
The gold dots are the great deserts — and the first thing to know is that a desert is defined by dryness, not by heat or sand. Any place that receives very little precipitation is a desert, which is why the two largest deserts on Earth are not hot at all: they are the polar deserts of Antarctica and the Arctic, where almost no snow falls and what does fall almost never melts. Antarctica alone is larger than every hot desert combined. We leave the poles off the map — drawing a whole continent as one dot would mislead more than it teaches — and show the great non-polar deserts instead.
Among those, the Sahara is the giant, a sea of sand and rock across North Africa nearly the size of the United States. The others divide into hot deserts and cold ones: the Arabian, Kalahari, Namib, Sonoran and Australian deserts bake under subtropical sun, while the Gobi, the Great Basin and the high deserts of Central Asia freeze in winter — cold deserts, dry because mountains wring the moisture from the air long before it reaches them. The driest of all is the Atacama in Chile, where some weather stations have never recorded rain. Each desert here is marked at a single representative point, because a desert has no sharp edge: it fades gradually into the land around it, and any boundary — or area figure — is an approximation.
The natural wonders
The green dots are the natural wonders — the showpieces, the places that stop you in your tracks. They are deliberately varied, because the planet's wonders come in many forms. There are the great waterfalls: Victoria Falls, the widest curtain of water in the world; Iguazú, a horseshoe of 275 separate cascades; Angel Falls, the tallest single drop on Earth. There are landforms carved by water and time — the mile-deep Grand Canyon, the granite walls of Yosemite, the drowned karst towers of Hạ Long Bay and Zhangjiajie. There is the strange chemistry of the Dead Sea, the lowest dry land anywhere; the white mineral terraces of Pamukkale; the world's largest mirror, the salt flat of Salar de Uyuni; and the geysers of Yellowstone, venting the heat of a sleeping supervolcano. Some, like Uluru and Mount Roraima, are simply vast, ancient rock — landmarks that have stood, essentially unchanged, for hundreds of millions of years.
How to read the overlay
Turn it on from the Nature group of the overlays panel on the Atlas canvas. The landmarks draw over whatever you already have up — a temperature map, a population map, or the plain political world — so you can place the world's great natural features against any other story the Atlas tells. Tap any dot for its name, its location, and a one-line fact: a peak's height, a desert's approximate size, or what makes a wonder worth the journey. The colour is the key: blue for the great peaks, gold for the great deserts, green for the natural wonders. It is a curated set — sixty landmarks, twenty of each — with coordinates from public-domain data and the choosing done by hand, because some collections are best drawn not by a machine, but by someone deciding what truly belongs.
Frequently asked questions
What are the eight-thousanders?
The eight-thousanders are the fourteen mountains on Earth whose summits rise more than 8,000 metres (about 26,250 feet) above sea level. They are, from highest to lowest: Everest, K2, Kangchenjunga, Lhotse, Makalu, Cho Oyu, Dhaulagiri I, Manaslu, Nanga Parbat, Annapurna I, Gasherbrum I, Broad Peak, Gasherbrum II and Shishapangma. Every one of them stands in the Himalaya or the neighbouring Karakoram, along the collision zone where the Indian plate is driving into Asia — which is why the highest mountains on the planet are packed into one relatively small region. Climbing all fourteen is one of mountaineering's supreme challenges; only a few dozen people have done it.
What are the Seven Summits?
The Seven Summits are the highest mountains on each of the seven continents, and climbing all of them is a classic mountaineering goal. They are Everest (Asia, 8,849 m), Aconcagua (South America, 6,961 m), Denali (North America, 6,190 m), Kilimanjaro (Africa, 5,895 m), Mount Elbrus (Europe, 5,642 m), Mount Vinson (Antarctica, 4,892 m) and — depending on where you draw the edge of a continent — either Puncak Jaya (4,884 m, the highest peak of the Australia–New Guinea landmass) or Mount Kosciuszko (2,228 m, the highest on the Australian mainland). This map uses Puncak Jaya, the taller and more demanding of the two.
What is the largest desert in the world?
By the strict definition, the largest desert on Earth is Antarctica. A desert is any region that receives very little precipitation — rain or snow — not necessarily a hot, sandy one, and almost no snow falls in the interior of Antarctica, so the whole frozen continent (about 14 million square kilometres) qualifies as a polar desert. The Arctic is the second largest. Among the hot deserts, the Sahara is by far the largest, at roughly 9.2 million square kilometres — close to the size of the United States or China. This map shows the great non-polar deserts, which is what most people mean by the word.
What is the tallest waterfall in the world?
Angel Falls in Venezuela is the tallest uninterrupted waterfall on Earth, with a total drop of 979 metres (3,212 feet) — so high that in the dry season much of the water evaporates or is blown away as mist before it reaches the bottom. It plunges from the edge of a tepui, one of the flat-topped tabletop mountains of the Guiana Highlands. The widest waterfall, by contrast, is Victoria Falls on the Zambezi, which sends the largest single sheet of falling water in the world over a precipice more than 1,700 metres wide.
What is the lowest point on land?
The shore of the Dead Sea, between Jordan and Israel, is the lowest point of dry land on Earth — its surface sits more than 430 metres below sea level, and it is still dropping as the sea shrinks. The water is so dense with dissolved salt (roughly ten times saltier than the ocean) that swimmers float effortlessly on the surface and nothing larger than microbes can live in it, which is how it got its name.
Why is this a curated list rather than every landmark?
Because a curated list is the honest way to map a small, famous, finite collection. The set is deliberately complete where completeness is meaningful — it includes all fourteen eight-thousanders and all of the Seven Summits — and otherwise picks the most significant and recognisable examples of each kind. Trying to harvest such a list automatically is the wrong tool: ask an open geographic database for every mountain above 8,000 metres and it returns more than a thousand, because elevations are stored in mixed units and hundreds of American peaks recorded in feet slip past the metre threshold. The coordinates here are drawn from Wikidata (public-domain) and were checked against it; the curation and descriptions are the Atlas Desk's own.
SEE IT ON THE MAP
Everything in this guide is on the live Atlas map.