Spanish 3D animator and YouTuber, MetaBallStudios, has assembled a series of comparison videos that paint Earth from a very unique perspective. The creative has, for example, compared the sizes of different countries—if they were planets. He’s even shown how much land farmers devote to different crops. Now, in another perspective-altering video, MetaBall gives us a size comparison of Earth’s islands. And they get big.
Digg picked up on MetaBall’s new video which, like most of his other size comparisons, is mind-blowing. While it starts out with islands of a respectable size—aside from the ridiculously tiny 361-square-yard Hub Island in New York—they quickly grow massive.
MetaBall, who also goes by “Alvaro,” appears to have assembled the string of islands in the lineup more or less randomly. But it’s around two-and-a-half minutes in—right around Sicily—that real and imagined size start to diverge. (At least for us, anyway.)
MetaBallStudios
After Sicily, which is nearly 20% the size of Florida, the lineup moves on to real behemoths; ones like the 20,000-square-mile Severny Island in Russia. Or Cuba, which covers 42,000 square miles of Earth.
Once the islands begin to more frequently become their own countries, geographic perspective begins to feel normal again. (Again, at least for us.) What is wild to think about at that point, however, is just how uninhabited some of these massive pieces of land are. Victoria Island in Canada, for example, is larger than Great Britain, yet only has a population of 2,162. For reference, Great Britain’s population is 66.7 million.
MetaBallStudios
The largest island is, of course, Australia. Just kidding! Australia can’t be considered an island because it’s a continent. So the title for largest island goes to—rumbly earthquake please—Greenland! Which like Victoria Island, has a wild population ratio; in its case, there’s only 56,000 people (as of 2019) on a stretch of land spanning 836,300 square miles. And that comparison, of land size to population, offers another great sense of perspective: Just how small we are in the grand scheme of the universe.
Feature image: MetaBallStudios
