Greenland – What Many People Do Not Understand

It is all about ‘size’, or at least the perception of size. And that is what makes it of interest to Trump, a man who likes ‘big’ things. Which might tell us something about the man himself.

Greenland, believe it or not, is nowhere the size that people generally consider it to be. And that is all due to the Mercator mapping system generally used in atlas depictions, tied to grid references, when viewing large areas of our world especially within the polar regions. Depictions of Antarctica also suffer excessively from the same kind of illustrative distortion. Only when depicted as if on the surface of a sphere, can that be corrected.

Greenland is often, and geographically defined, to be the world’s largest island. That is not strictly true, it being only little more than one third the size Australia – a single country, surrounded by water and with no borders to any other nation (just like Greenland). But Australia, due to its sheer size, is considered to be a continent, which takes precedence over also being an island – eliminating it from being listed as a world island. Just remember the actual difference between the two is something like ~3.6:1.

Greenland is best compared to the size of the two countries between which it sits on the list of world nations ranked by area in square kilometres. The following images from the CIA World Factbook – Country Comparisons – Area


…and Australia (note ranking)…


None of this is news. The information is fairly well known, and readers have probably heard it previously. I am just reminding of the facts. Perspective is everything.


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