Flag of Antarctica

What it means

• White map: the shape of the continent, left plain to show that it belongs to no single country
• Blue background: neutrality and peace, borrowed from the United Nations flag

Where it came from

Antarctica is not a country. No one owns it, and it is managed together by many countries under the Antarctic Treaty, so there is no government that could choose an official flag. Instead, people have designed unofficial ones.

The flag shown here was made in 1996 by the British flag designer Graham Bartram for a 3D atlas computer program. He based it on the flag of the United Nations: the blue and the plain white map stand for neutrality, since no country rules the continent.

History

One early proposal came from the flag expert Whitney Smith in 1978. His flag was bright orange, so it would be easy to see against snow and ice.

In 2018 Evan Townsend designed another popular flag called "True South". It has navy and white stripes for Antarctica's long days and nights, and a white mountain whose shadow looks like a compass needle pointing south. Some Antarctic research programmes and expeditions fly it. Research stations, though, mostly fly the flags of the countries that run them.

Easy to mix up with

• Cyprus: Cyprus also shows a map of the land, but in copper colour on white, with two olive branches
• Kosovo: Kosovo shows a gold map on blue, with six white stars above it