how big is australia
Australia covers about 7.69 million square kilometres, which makes it one of the largest countries on Earth and roughly as big as the continental United States.
Core facts
- The total area of Australia is about 7,688,000ā7,688,287 kmĀ² , or roughly 2,968,000 square miles.
- This size makes Australia the sixth-largest country in the world and the largest in Oceania.
- In practical terms, Australia is similar in size to the contiguous (lower 48) United States and significantly larger than all of Western Europe combined.
Size compared with other places
- Compared with the USA , Australia is only slightly smaller: about 2.99 million sq mi vs about 3.80 million sq mi for the whole US.
- Compared with Canada , Australiaās land area is smaller (about 7.68 million kmĀ² vs over 9 million kmĀ²), but still in the same broad ācontinental-scaleā range.
- Australia alone is much larger than regions like Central America or India , which each have far more people living on much smaller land areas.
Why it feels ābigger than you thinkā
- On common world maps, the way the globe is flattened can make countries near the equator look smaller and those near the poles look bigger, which often leads people to underestimate how big Australia is.
- When overlaid on map projections, Australia can stretch across most of Europe or match the width of the continental USA, surprising many people who imagined it as just a ālarge island.ā
TL;DR: Australia is a continental-sized country, about 7.7 million kmĀ², similar in area to the contiguous United States and much larger than it appears on many classroom maps.
Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.
