Australia Is Wider Than the Moon

More detail

The Moon looms large in the night sky and feels enormous by human intuition, but a simple comparison puts its size in a surprising context: Australia, from its easternmost point to its westernmost point, spans approximately 2,500 miles. The Moon's diameter is about 2,160 miles. In terms of raw width measured in a straight line, the driest inhabited continent on Earth is broader than Earth's only natural satellite. This does not hold when comparing area — the Moon's surface area of about 14.6 million square miles dwarfs Australia's 2.97 million square miles. But as a sense-of-scale exercise, the comparison is genuinely disorienting. Australia also contains more than 10,000 mainland beaches; visiting one per day would take nearly 29 years. The country's sheer horizontal scale is also why it spans three time zones, and why a flight from Perth to Sydney takes longer than a flight from London to Cairo.