Making Sense Of The World, One Map At A Time
Olympus Mons is the tallest mountain and largest volcano on any planet in the solar system.
Its height from base to peak is 21.9 km (13.6 mi or 72,000 ft) or 26 km (16.2 miles) above the northern plains. This makes it at least two and a half times taller than Mount Everest’s height above sea level.
The map above shows how big Luxembourg is compared to Singapore, Andorra, Malta, Liechtenstein, San Marino, Monaco, and the Vatican.
According to the UN, Tokyo is the world’s most populous metropolitan area with an estimated 37.8 million people in 2014. The next closest is the Seoul National Capital Area with a population of 25.6 million people or over 10 million fewer than Tokyo!
So how does this compare to US cities?
While it doesn’t look it, Africa is big, really big. In fact, Africa’s true size is 30 million square km, just under twice the size of Russia or bigger than Canada, the United States and China put together!
The Netherlands (aka Holland) is the 30th most densely populated country or territory in the world and the densest country in Europe with a over 10 million people. So it’s understandable that the Dutch might think that their country is a little bit crowded.
However, the map above flips this idea on its head.
The map above shows the relative position of major European cities if they were suddenly moved to Texas. Depending on your point of view, it either shows that Texas is really big or Europe is very small.
With the New Horizons probe putting Pluto back in the news, just how big is it?
Most of us tend to think of Earth as being the sole planet in the solar system with water. Water exists on Mars, but almost exclusively as ice.
For the time being, Earth remains the lone planet in the universe to have stable bodies of liquid water on its surface. However, it may not be the celestial body with the most water or even the most liquid water within our own solar system.
The map above shows the relative size of the world’s 26 largest islands. Combined they cover 7.7 million square km (roughly the size of Australia) and have 540 million people living on them (behind only China and India).
If you’re curious to learn a bit more about them, below you can find their names, what country (or countries) they belong to, their areas and the population of each island (data from Wikipedia):
Did you know that California, Sweden and Madagascar are all quite similar in size? Don’t believe me? Well look at the map above comparing California and Madagascar or the one below comparing Sweden and Madagascar. Here are a few comparisons between the 3 based on data from Wikipedia:
In terms of total area: