How High Is the World? Height Above Sea Level, Mountains and Where People Live, from Open Terrain Data

I describe the height of the world's land from the open AWS Terrain Tiles (Mapzen's Terrarium mosaic of SRTM, GMTED2010, ETOPO1 and national elevation models), using the zoom 4 level of the tiles as a 4,096 by 4,096 Web Mercator grid of about 9.8 km at the equator, with every cell weighted by its true area and land defined by Natural Earth countries less lakes. The world's land averages 807 m above sea level (678 m without Antarctica) with a median of 432 m; 26% of it lies above 1,000 m, 11% above 2,000 m and 0.5% above 5,000 m. Antarctica is the highest continent (2,208 m) and Asia the highest without ice (1,059 m); among countries large enough to be resolved, Tajikistan (2,961 m) is the highest and the Netherlands (10 m) the lowest. About 355,893 km² of land in named depressions lies below sea level at this resolution, 76% of it around the Caspian. I check 136,410 Wikidata peaks against the terrain, keeping 134,657, and confirm the highest point of 189 countries against an independent list. Finally, of the 2.6 billion people in 4,325 Wikidata cities of 50,000 or more, 10.3% live above 1,000 m and 1.9% above 2,000 m: people live far lower than the land lies. An interactive map draws the same tiles at every zoom with a height readout for any point. Interactive version: https://maps.tristanhotham.com/world-terrain/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/world-terrain. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/31/world-terrain/. Text, figures and derived data: CC BY 4.0 (prominence values from English Wikipedia: CC BY-SA 4.0); code: MIT. Terrain: AWS Terrain Tiles (Mapzen; SRTM, GMTED2010, ETOPO1 and other sources listed at github.com/tilezen/joerd), not redistributed. Peaks and cities: Wikidata (CC0). Boundaries, lakes and places: Natural Earth (public domain).