Biggest Island in the World
Largest island in the worldIsland by area
These are a shortlist of the world' s more than 2,500 square kilometres of island areas and several other 1,000 square kilometres of area. Contiguous objects are also displayed for reference. While this part of the inventory may not be exhaustive, it does cover almost every island in the world over 1,000 sqkm.
Some of the area of Antarctica is unsafe.
Five largest islands in the world
When you are as strangely inspired by Google Maps and Google Earth as I am, you spent innumerable endless hours imagining holidays, following streams to the end of their source, or just marvelling at how big and divers. One of my last map-induced striving for more meaningless information led me to think of nothing but the water-bound plots of ground you call islets.
Then I started to think, hmm, I wonder what the five biggest isles in the world are? Ups! With 836,109 square miles (2,166,086 square kilometers), Greenland is the world' s biggest island (unless you want to be a nuisance and count the number of planets as islands). Brave discoverers from Iceland and Denmark already populated Greenland in 986 AD, and one of these humans was everyone's favourite Vikings, Erik the Red.
The Greenlandic people still swear loyalty to Denmark, and the Queen of Denmark is technologically "responsible", but she also has her own chosen premier. Greenland, with 56,615 people, is the least populous nation in the world. Nuuk has only 15,469 people!
For the most part, the island is quite unattractive for humans without the few areas along the coastline that are not iced. New Guinea is with an area of 786.000 km the second biggest island of the world and thus clearly smaller than Greenland.
It is a two-country island in the centre of Southeast Asia. Indonesia has the west half, Papua New Guinea the east half. New Guinea is not an abandoned island with a global human populace of 7.5 million.
But the biggest town in terms of inhabitants is Port Moresby in Paupau-New Guinea with only 307,643 inhabitants. Clan wu tan (I just thought Rza was a sweet Asiatic gal or something when he came up with the name).
Also in Southeast Asia, Barneo is number 3 on our biggest island on the worldslist. It has an area of 287,001 square miles (743,330 km²), which is quite similar to the area of New Guinea, but with over 18,590,000 inhabitants it has a much bigger populace. It is home to three states, a part of Indonesia (about 3 fourths of the island), Malaysia (1 quarter) and Brunei with only about 1%.
The Samarinda is the biggest town of 726,223 inhabitants on the island of Borneo (in Indonesia). The island's varied and interesting eco-systems, abundant cultural life and accessible holiday opportunities are making the Bornean holiday increasingly attractive. Madagascar, off the south-east African coastline, is the fourth biggest island in the world.
It is only one of the countries that share its name and covers an area of 578,041 km². Madagascar separated from India over 80 million years ago and has one of the most outstanding plant and animal libraries, over 90% of which can only be found on the island.
Humans are almost as diverse as wildlife (humans are actually wildlife, I don't mind your religion ) and believe it or not, all the way from Borneo (guess it was always overcrowded and they picked the next biggest island). There is Baffin Island in 5th place on our world' s biggest island shortlist, and you've probably never seen it on a worldmap before.
Probably because it got entangled in a heap of other, not very well-known isles. Its occupancy is 195.927. 9 sqm (507.451 km²) and the overall populace is just over 10.000! Most of the residents are Inuit (Eskimos) and Iqaluit.
It was established in 1942 by Americans to act as a refueling station for planes flying to Europe for the efforts of warfare. Nobody's an island.