In their defence, a lot of it is sand.
I'm starting to think that maybe Europe just isn't that big
no but because australia is close to the bottom of the map and the flat map is distorted to fit a square map shape, australia on the flat map is significantly smaller compared to places closer to the equator.
Thank you for being the one single person in the notes who understands map projections. Australia is big, but still significantly smaller than the US.
Australia is not significantly smaller than the mainland US, no. These are the real sizes, not a Mercator projection. I think you're misunderstanding what yanzinator said. The US does have significantly larger island territories than Australia, though.
The continuous US (so, not counting the islands and Alaska) and Australia are roughly the same size:
US: 2,959,064.44 square miles (7,663,941.7 km2)
Australia: 2,969,907 sq mi (7,692,024 km2)
And the person above has the impact of the Mercator projection completely backwards: North America and Europe appear much larger than they actually are due to their latitudes. Most notably Greenland looks like it is bigger than Africa! (It isnโt.)
In the picture below, the pale blue is Mercator and the dark blue is actual size:
And here is Africa vs Greenland:
There is a website where you can drag and drop countries on top of each other to see the actual size comparison taking into account projection
Drag and drop countries around the map to compare their relative size. Is Greenland really as big as all of Africa? You may be surprised at
It's pretty cool and also Japan is a lot bigger than I thought it was
