Physical map of North America

Physical map of North America shows the shape of the land with shaded relief and colors for elevation. Rivers and lakes are drawn in blue, and dashed lines show country borders. Download the labeled map or use the version without names as a worksheet.

Physical map of North America
Physical map of North AmericaPNG 2200×1399 (1.3 MB)Physical map of North America (PDF A4) (522 KB)

How to read this map

Named features on this map include Alps, Rocky Mountains, Great Plains, Iberian Peninsula, Great Basin, Atlas Mountains, Appalachian Mountains, Brooks Range, Coast Mountains, Cascade Range, Alaska Range, Atlantic coastal plain, Central Lowlands, Llanos, Saharan Atlas, Sierra Madre del Sur, Sierra Madre Oriental, Mont Blanc, Mount Washington. The terrain colors help locate these features within the surrounding lowlands, plateaus and mountain belts.

The mapped river network includes Snake, Columbia, São Francisco, Rhein, La Grande, Rio Grande, Saskatchewan, IJssel. Only selected rivers are labeled at this scale; a missing label does not mean that a river is absent.

Greens show lower elevations; tan and brown show higher land, with pale tones toward the highest terrain. Shadows emphasize the slopes. Vertical relief is exaggerated to make landforms easier to read, so the map is not a slope survey. Blue tones distinguish seas from land; the legend is a guide to land elevation, not a chart of water depth.

The relief uses Terrain Tiles, a composite of SRTM, GMTED2010 and ETOPO1 elevation data distributed through the AWS Open Data program. Boundaries, rivers, lakes and feature names come from Natural Earth. These are small-scale educational maps rather than navigation or engineering surveys.

Blank physical map

The blank version keeps the mapped features and removes the place labels. Download it for a geography worksheet or practice identifying the features.

Physical map of North America without names
Blank version of physical map of north america.PNG 2200×1399 (1.3 MB)Physical map of North America: blank (PDF A4) (475 KB)

Features and names

ReferenceName or description
Named physical featureAlps
Named physical featureRocky Mountains
Named physical featureGreat Plains
Named physical featureIberian Peninsula
Named physical featureGreat Basin
Named physical featureAtlas Mountains
Named physical featureAppalachian Mountains
Named physical featureBrooks Range
Named physical featureCoast Mountains
Named physical featureCascade Range
Named physical featureAlaska Range
Named physical featureAtlantic coastal plain
Named physical featureCentral Lowlands
Named physical featureLlanos
Named physical featureSaharan Atlas
Named physical featureSierra Madre del Sur
Named physical featureSierra Madre Oriental
Named physical featureMont Blanc
Named physical featureMount Washington

Data sources and license

Map design and rendered images: Atlas of Maps, CC BY 4.0. Source databases retain their own licenses; the map license does not replace them.

Also see the political map of North America with countries and capitals.

Frequently asked questions

What does a physical map show?

A physical map shows landforms and water: mountains, plateaus, lowlands, rivers, lakes and seas. This map uses elevation colors and hill shading instead of coloring each country separately.

Can I download physical map of north america without labels?

Yes. The blank relief map retains the terrain, rivers and outlines but removes place names. Both versions are available as PNG and PDF; the PDF uses A4 paper and can be scaled to US Letter.

Use this map

You can download, print and share this map for free, in class, in school projects, in presentations and on websites, as long as you credit the source: Physical map of North America · Atlas of Maps (atlasofmaps.com), license CC BY 4.0.

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