New Guinea

The numbers

• 775,000km²Area, measured299,000 mi² · Natural Earth outline
• 786,000km²Area, publishedWikidata · agrees within 2%

The area is measured from the outline drawn above, on the WGS84 ellipsoid; the published figure is shown beside it, and a water body is kept only if the two are within 10%.

What the numbers say about New Guinea

• Greenland (island), the largest of the 81 islands ranked on sizeversus, is 2.80× the size of New Guinea; New Guinea ranks 2nd.
• New Guinea sits between Greenland (island) (2,171,000 km²) and Borneo (725,000 km²) in the ranking.
• Counted as a country, New Guinea would be larger than 175 of the 212 countries listed on sizeversus and would rank 38th by area, between Turkey (780,000 km²) and Zambia (752,000 km²).
• It is larger than 50 of the 51 US states and districts (the biggest of them is Texas, 685,000 km²) and smaller than 1.
• It is larger than 28 of the 31 provinces and regions of China (the biggest of them is Qinghai, 714,000 km²) and smaller than 3.
• The closest Chinese province is Qinghai (714,000 km²): New Guinea is 1.08× the size of Qinghai.
• New Guinea lies at 5°S, close to the equator, where a standard web map (Web Mercator) is nearly true to size: it inflates area by only about 1.0×.
• Laid out flat, New Guinea stretches about 1,150 km north to south and 2,190 km east to west.
• Wikidata’s published figure of 786,000 km² agrees with our measured 775,000 km², to within 2%.

About the same size as

Where it lies

• Indonesia
• Papua New Guinea

Natural Earth’s outlines of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea contain or lie within 4 km of the outline of New Guinea. That is what its geometry says, and it is not a statement about who owns the water or where any border runs in it.

Compare New Guinea

• Turkey vs New Guinea