Antarctica is the world's largest desert, despite being covered mostly by ice.
A desert is defined by very low precipitation, not by heat or sand. Antarctica receives little snowfall across much of its interior, with some areas getting less than 50 millimetres of water-equivalent precipitation annually. The continent’s vast ice sheet formed because snow accumulated over immense periods and compacted into ice.
Antarctica covers about 14 million square kilometres, making it larger than Europe and Australia. Its ice sheet contains roughly 90% of the world’s ice and about 60% of the planet’s fresh water. The continent is also the coldest, driest, and windiest place on Earth.
A common mistake is to identify the Sahara as the largest desert. The Sahara is the largest hot desert, but Antarctica is larger overall. The Arctic is also a polar desert, yet it is an ocean surrounded by land rather than a continent.