Why does greenland look bigger than australia

But since India is located near the equator its size look much smaller than Greenland. Similarly, look at an equatorial country like Egypt 1,, sq km. So what makes this small North Atlantic island so unique and fascinating? It is also the land of the midnight sun. The question of how to project a three-dimensional, spherical Earth onto a two-dimensional, flat surface is old; early cartographers tried to find the best way to solve this problem.

In the end, cartographers found a solution: Use complex mathematical transformations called map projections. One of the most popular, especially for nautical maps, was the Mercator projection.

Sailors used these projections a lot for navigational purposes, especially when they were exploring the New World and crossing oceans. The main characteristics of the Mercator projection are that it represents lines of the same course as straight segments and conserves the angles with meridians. Eurasia is equally undoubtedly one continent, onto which the continent of India has rather less recently impinged, as has also the African-Arabian continent, which of course is in process of splitting down the Red Sea.

Australia is another ancient continental block - nowadays, curiously, forming one plate with India, and like it moving north to sweep ancient island arcs against Asia.

If anyone's around after ten rotations of the Microsoft Outlook Calendar, look out for Japan as a mountain range far inland, like Kohistan today! Philip Clark, Builth Wells, Wales Lets say that an island is a single land mass, surrounded by natural water i.

However, that said, Greenland is simply bigger than Australia, and thats why the encyclopedias describe it as the worlds largest island ; it is. Harry, Bristol When Harry from Bristol says Greenland is larger than Australia, he is surely being led astray by the convention of the use of Mercator's projection to represent a portion of the Earth on a flat surface.

This system makes landmasses appear larger the further they are from the equator. Antarctica would be infinitely large on this system. On the other hand, Greenland has a much smaller population and is ranked th globally with almost sixty thousand people living there. However, most parts of Greenland are covered with ice resulting in harsh living conditions which may suggest a reason why there are few inhabitants here.

The population may not be an appropriate measure of size since regions such as Antarctica would have been negligible due to near zero population. Considering the land area, Australia is almost four times bigger than Greenland. Some of the factors which may be considered are the tectonic plates onto which these regions lie on. Australia has its tectonic plate known as the Australian Plate. On the other hand, Greenland does not have its own but instead sits on the North American Tectonic Plate.

As a result, Australia should be considered to be on its own because it does not share the tectonic plate with another continent.