how big is greenland compared to australia

Greenland looks huge on many world maps, but Australia is actually much larger in real life. Australia is a bit more than three times the size of Greenland by land area.

Basic size comparison

• Greenland’s total area is about 2.16 million km².

• Australia’s area is about 7.69 million km².

• So, Australia is roughly 3.5 times bigger than Greenland in terms of total area.

Why maps make Greenland look bigger

On many school and online maps, the common Mercator projection stretches land near the poles, making Greenland seem almost as big as or bigger than Australia. Australia, being closer to the equator, is not stretched as much, so its true size is visually shrunk in comparison.

A quick way to picture it

• If Australia were a big sheet of paper, you could lay three Greenlands plus a bit more on top before running out of space.

• Despite that, Greenland still holds the title of the world’s largest island that is not a continent , while Australia is usually classified as a continent rather than an island.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.