Exactly how big is the United Kingdom?

Following on from the theme of a recent post, about the size of different countries, I thought it would be interesting to compare the size of the United Kingdom to other parts of the world. The UK covers an area of about 243,000 square km., which is quite big in some ways, but not so big in others (ask any Canadian). It's all a matter of perspective. Some maps and facts below, with the UK superimposed on different parts of the world. Click the maps to see them in full size.

• Russia is 70 times larger than the UK
• Canada is about 41 times larger than the UK
• The USA and China are both approximately 40 times larger than the UK
• Brazil is 35 times bigger than the UK
• Australia is about 32 times bigger than the UK
• India is 13 times bigger
• Sudan is 10 times bigger (n.b. now split in two since I originally wrote this)
• Iran is 7 times bigger
• France is twice as big (this is just the European part, not the overseas départements)

NOTES: I've used an equal area projection so there is a bit more map distortion than I'd like but this was just a bit of fun to make a point and remind myself of the relative size of the UK. For the USA I've shown the continental US and Alaska on separate maps. I've not shown Hawaii this time.

The Size of Countries: USA and China

There have been a few blog posts elsewhere recently about the size of Africa. Kai Krause was the original blogger on this with his 'True Size of Africa' map, which is very impressive. This was picked up by a couple of other blogs, including the Economist's take on it and the Spatial Analysis blog at CASA.

I've recently been looking at this kind of thing from a different perspective but still in relation to the size of countries. Some of this has involved playing around with regions, nations and population data. I thought it would be interesting to look at the USA and China since they are very similar in area but very different in population.

Some images below. Click to view them full size. This first one puts the USA and China side-by-side with population data included and the second one superimposes China on the USA's land area.