Square Kilometers to Square Centimeters (km² to cm²)

1 square kilometer equals 10,000,000,000 square centimeters exactly.

1 square kilometer = 10,000,000,000 square centimeters

How to convert square kilometers to square centimeters

To convert square kilometers to square centimeters, multiply the number of square kilometers by 10,000,000,000. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply square centimeters by 1×10⁻¹⁰.

square centimeters = square kilometers × 10,000,000,000

Example: 10 square kilometers = 100,000,000,000 square centimeters.

About these units

Square Kilometer (km²)

Metric (SI)Current unit

One million square meters (100 hectares). Used for the area of cities, countries and lakes.

Metric land measure took a surprisingly long time to settle on the kilometer. The meter was defined in 1799, yet people initially preferred the myriameter, 10,000 meters, and the French phrase myriamètres par heure was still in print in 1802. The Netherlands adopted the kilometer in 1817 under the name mijl. Once the kilometer was established, the square kilometer followed naturally as the unit for areas too large to count comfortably in hectares or square meters.

One square kilometer is 1,000,000 square meters, or 100 hectares, about 0.3861 square miles or 247.1 acres. A useful picture comes from history: many medieval European cities were enclosed by walls around roughly a square kilometer, with Delft at about 0.9 km² and Lucca at about 1.09 km². A standard 18-hole golf course of 6,000 meters needs about 0.8 km². The symbol km² means the square of a kilometer, not a thousand square meters. The planned Square Kilometre Array radio telescope takes its name from the collecting area it aims for.

1 square kilometer = 1,000,000 square meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Square kilometre; Wikipedia: Kilometres per hour

Square Centimeter (cm²)

Metric (SI)Current unit

A square one centimeter on a side; 1/10,000 of a square meter.

Physicists, rather than surveyors, put the centimeter at the center of a measuring system. Carl Friedrich Gauss proposed absolute units based on length, mass and time in 1832, choosing the millimeter, and in 1873 a British Association committee including James Clerk Maxwell and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) recommended the centimeter, gram and second instead. In that CGS system the square centimeter turns up inside derived units, such as the stokes of kinematic viscosity, defined as one square centimeter per second.

A square centimeter is one ten-thousandth of a square meter, so 10,000 of them fill a square meter. It is a natural size for small flat things: a square inch is exactly 6.4516 cm², and a square foot is exactly 929.0304 cm². Because the CGS system defined force and pressure with the centimeter, the dyne per square centimeter became its unit of pressure, called the barye, which equals 0.1 pascal. SI practice prefers the square meter for large areas and the square millimeter for very small ones.

1 square centimeter = 0.0001 square meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Centimetre-gram-second system of units; Wikipedia: Square centimetre; NIST Guide to the SI, Appendix B.8: conversion factors

Related conversions

See all area units.