Greenland

Greenland covers about 2,175,600 square kilometres, well over twice the size of the next largest island, New Guinea. A thick ice sheet covers most of it.

Australia is bigger but is classed as a continent rather than an island.

Context

Greenland's area of about 2.17 million km² includes the ice-free coastal land and the ice-covered interior, and published figures vary slightly depending on whether small offshore islands are counted. It is roughly 2.8 times the size of New Guinea, the second-largest island, which covers about 786,000 km².

The ice sheet covers about 1.7 million km², roughly 80 percent of the island, and is more than 3 km thick at its deepest. According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Center it holds about 2.9 million km³ of ice, enough to raise global sea level by around 7 m if it melted completely, though that would take centuries or longer.

The island's population is only around 56,000 people, almost all living along the ice-free coast, mostly in the south-west. Greenland is a self-governing territory within the Kingdom of Denmark. Its large map size in common projections such as Mercator makes it look even bigger than it is, which is a distortion of the map, not a measurement error.

Greenland's capital, Nuuk, lies on the south-west coast, and the interior ice sheet is effectively uninhabited.