Australia vs Iceland

Australia is 75 times larger than Iceland — 7,741,220 against 103,000 km². Australia is 70 times more populous than Iceland — 27,614,411 against 392,404 people.

Side by side

Population density

Iceland is slightly more densely populated, by 6.8% — 4 against 4 people per km². Density is where area and population interact, and it often reverses the impression the headline figures give — a large country with a small population can feel emptier than a small crowded one by an enormous margin.

Practical differences

• They drive on opposite sides — Australia on the left, Iceland on the right.
• Different currencies: the Australian dollar and the Icelandic króna.
• Australia spans 5 time zones, so "local time" there is not a single answer.
• Different continents — Oceania and Europe.

Australia

The sixth-largest country in the world and the only one that covers an entire continent. The Great Barrier Reef runs about 2,300 km and is the largest structure made by living organisms on Earth, visible from orbit. Around eighty percent of its mammals, reptiles and flowering plants exist nowhere else. Melbourne and Sydney are within roughly a hundred thousand people of each other, and which counts as the largest city depends on where the boundary is drawn.

Iceland

Iceland sits astride the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, so the North American and Eurasian plates pull apart across the country at about 2 cm a year. Roughly eleven percent of it is under glacier, Vatnajökull alone covering some 7,900 km². Almost all its electricity and heating come from hydro and geothermal sources.

Neutral facts only. Nothing here addresses politics, government, economics or which country is preferable in any respect — population is the one figure that dates, and it carries its year.