The world is marked by hundreds of thousands of islands, which are classified as landmasses permanently above water but not identified as a continent, such as Australia. The largest island on earth is Greenland, but there are countries made up mostly, or entirely, of archipelagos—chains, clusters, or collections of islands. In some cases, like Norway and Sweden, these amount to more than 200,000 islands within the countries' borders. Check out the full dataset below.
Source: World Atlas
The 100 biggest islands range from the likes of expansive Greenland to independent Guadalcanal, the largest of the Solomon Islands. But look a little closer, and you’ll see just how much the top contender outshines the rest. Greenland is almost three times the size of the second-biggest island of New Guinea, and you could fit over 408 Guadalcanal islands within it.
Quite a few islands around the world are very large, and many of them are countries. Australia is technically an island because it is unconnected to any other body of land, but it is more commonly considered a continental landmass. Of the seven continents, Australia is the smallest, at 2,969,976 square miles, or 7,692,202 square kilometers.
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Source: U.S. Geological Survey, World Economic Forum