The Size of Wales Trivia Quiz

A football pitch can vary in size but the dimensions for the international game are defined as being in the range of 100 to 110 metres long by 64 to 75 metres wide. By my rough estimation that means you could fit between 2,518,667 and 3,246,718 pitches in Wales. Of course, in Wales they prefer rugby anyway.

3122 Florence, to give her official name, has a mean diameter of approximately 4.35km squared. Florence, part of the Amor group of asteroids, is classed as a near-earth object. In 2017 it passed Earth at just over seven million km distance. Such a distance means it is viewed as a potentially hazardous object even though the likelihood of it colliding with Earth is vanishingly small.

A23a began moving away from Antarctica in 2020, passing the tip of the continent in 2023. It had separated from the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf in 1986 but its enormous size (nearly 4000 km squared) meant it got lodged in the sea bed for 34 years. Briefly A23a was pushed into second place by its sister A76 (roughly the size of Cornwall) but when that broke up shortly afterwards, A23a was returned to being the largest floating iceberg in the world.

With an area of 10,434 km squared, Big Island is slightly over half the size of Wales (if you'll forgive such imprecision). Hawaiʻi is the largest island in the United States by area although its population of around 200,000 is dwarfed by Long Island in New York with its more than seven million inhabitants.

Did you spot the trick question? Cymru is the Welsh name for Wales so obviously Cymru is precisely the same 20,779 km squared size as Wales. Other countries that are a similar size are Slovenia (20,271 km squared) and El Salvador (21,041 km squared).

Victoria is the second largest lake in the world by surface area. It covers 59,947 km squared across parts of Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. By comparison, the largest lake in Wales is Llyn Tegid that has a surface area of just 6 km squared. Lake Victoria hasn't been that small since it refilled around 12500 BC, after the last ice age.

Wales represents 8.5% of the land mass of the United Kingdom, making it the third largest of the four constituent countries. It is approximately one and a half times the size of Northern Ireland, a quarter of the size of Scotland and six and a half times smaller than England. By comparison it had 4.6% of the UK population according to the 2021 census and 15% of the UK coastline.

With 268,431 km squared of land, Colorado is the 8th largest state in the United States of America. That makes it twice the size of England and slightly bigger than the UK as a whole.

It is sometimes joked that because Wales is so hilly, if it were flattened out it would be bigger than England but Colorado also dwarfs Wales in terms of height. As the most elevated state in the USA, Colorado's average elevation of 2,074 metres above sea level is almost double the highest point in Wales, the peak of Snowdonia, which summits at 1,085 metres.

As an active weather system, an anticyclone, the size of the red spot has varied throughout time. The diameter of the storm has ranged from around 30,000 km in the mid-19th century to around 16,500 km in the early 21st century. Either way, that is greater than the diameter of Earth. Scientists have yet to establish the age of the storm or why it has lasted so long but it has been continuously observed since 1878. It is likely that the lack of a surface on Jupiter means that there is little friction to slow the storm down.

Of course, as Saturn is a gas giant, it doesn't technically have a surface. For the sake of measurement, the diameter of a gas giant is calculated by the point at which the pressure of its gases becomes equal to 1 earth atmosphere (1 atm). From this diameter, the notional surface area can be established (surface area = four times the square of the radius times pi).

If the measurement of 2.05 MegaWales doesn't give you a grasp on just how big Saturn is, then Saturn's surface area is 85 times that of the Earth. The journey from the edge of Saturn's atmosphere to its core (its radius), were that physically possible, is the equivalent distance of driving one and a half times round the circumference of the Earth at the equator. By comparison, the length of the radius of the Earth is roughly equal to the distance from Cardiff, Wales to Knoxville, TN.