The True Size of Australia

The first thing I saw in 2024 was this Tweet by Darren Wiens:

Cartographers have long known about the area distortion of the North due to the Mercator projection commonly used on web maps (e.g. Greenland vs. Africa), but weird no one talks about New Zealand being larger than Australia? See for yourself here:True Size of Australia

— Darren Wiens (@dkwiens) December 31, 2023

I can assure you that nothing else will astound you as much this year as the astonishing True Size of Australia. Drag Australia over New Zealand on Darren's map and you will discover that contrary to popular conception New Zealand is actually a much larger country than its north-western neighbor.

If you are interested in comparing the sizes of other countries with each other then you can also use The True Size Of interactive map. The True Size Of allows you to overlay the shape of any country on top of any other country on an interactive map. Enter the name of a country and you can then drag the selected country's polygon around on the map in order to compare its size with any other location on Earth.

Strangely if you compare Australia and New Zealand on The True Size Of map then Australia looks to be much, much bigger than New Zealand - shurely shome mishtake.