I have heard 2 answers to this, the one I hear most often is Greenland. Occasionally I hear Australia.
Which one is it?
Greenland is actually several islands close together that are covered by a single ice sheet. For it to be an island, it has to be a whole land mass.
But people say Australia isn’t an island because it is its own continent. But it’s not REALLY its own continent, because it is part of Australasia which includes other countries.
So what is the world’s largest island? I have searched and found 2 sources. One says Greenland. One says Australia.
To the best of my knowledge, Australia is both an island and a continent - we are often referred to as the “island continent”.
Australia the continent consists only of the mainland; Australia the nation also includes islands such as Tasmania, Kangaroo Island, the Torres Strait Islands, Lord Howe Island, Norfolk Island, and a few others that I can’t rightly remember right now.
Australasia is a dated geopolitical term that groups together nations in the region of the southwest Pacific Ocean: including Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, Indonesia etc. These days the more commonly used term is Oceania. Never has Australasia been a continent.
As for the original post, I thought it was a toss-up between Greenland and Madagascar, but I’m willing to stand corrected.
Australia may be large enough to qualilify as a continental landmass, depending on where you decide to draw the line. The difference is simply how you define “island”. The distinction between the two does not naturally exist, it requires setting an upper limit for the size of an island. There is no widely agreed upon definition, hence the disagreement between your sources.
My Hammond World Atlas has a statistical section. It lists Australia under “The Continents”, but not under “Largest Islands”, following the “Australia is a continent, not an island” pattern. Australia is just a hair under 3 million square miles.
The first few islands listed (somebody mentioned Madagascar):
I stick with the atlas and say “Greenland”. If you admit continents, why not Antarctica, which is nearly double the size of Australia, and clearly a separate landmass surrounded by water? Hell, why not Europe/Asia/Africa considered as a single land mass?
If we really have to consider Greenland as a group of separate landmasses, the answer may become New Guinea - I haven’t seen any figures on the relative sizes of the five pieces.
Hmmmmm. No biggie, Guiness Book of World Records says:
Discounting Australia, which is usually regarded as a continental land-mass, the largest island in the world is
Greenland (now officially known as Kalaallit Nunaat), with an area of about 2 175 000 square-km 840,000
square-miles There is evidence that Greenland is in fact several islands overlaid by an ice cap without which it
would have an area of 1,680 000 square-km 650,000 square-miles The largest sand island in the world is
Fraser Island, Queensland, Australia with a sand dune 120 km 75 miles long.
The size of the land mass does not determine whether it should be called a continent. The continents lie on the continental shelves formed after the breaking apart of Pangea. Australia is on a continental shelf and is a continent. Greenland is not and is an island.
The same is said about Antarctica. It is said that without the ice cap it is two or more landmasses and smaller than Aussie. So if that is true then we have another candidate.