How big are places compared to other places?

Traveling across the South Island of New Zealand by train, I was trying to work out for myself how big exactly the country is.

It looked big

With the help of OverlapMaps, here’s a comparison of New Zealand to California:

The total land area of New Zealand, says Google, is 103,483 mi²

In US state terms, that makes it just smaller than Colorado, at 104,185 mi².

Colorado has about 1 million more people.

Colorado: 5.356 million (2014)

New Zealand: 4.5 million

Pop wise New Zealand is about the size of Kentucky or Louisiana.

The folks at Brilliant Maps do fantastic work in this field.  Here are some of my favorites:

Los Angeles and other cities overlaid on The Netherlands:

Not sure I totally understand what’s going on here.

Cali and Madagascar:

The size of the Pacific:

Map by Chris Stephens, from naturalearthdata.com

US population in Europe:

Created by: reddit user Tom1099

US in China by population:

How the US population fits into China by reddit user jackblack2323

OR:

Map by reddit user gotrees

Size of different islands:

The relative size of the 24 largest islands in the world, map by reddit user evening_raga

And The Circle:

Map created by reddit user valeriepieris

Here’s one more for you, from OverlandMaps:

Australia’s population is 23.13 million or so, so it’s about three million people bigger than Florida (20.2 mill) and smaller than Texas (27.46 mill).  Whole lotta room down there.  About as many people as Illinois and Pennsylvania put together, in a land area (2.97 million square miles) that’s about as big as 51 Illinoises.

one of Australia’s more densely populated areas.