What is the world's largest island?

Greenland, at about 2.2 million square kilometres - though the definition is doing work, since Australia is three times larger and is called a continent rather than an island by convention alone. Greenland is roughly a quarter the size of Australia and gets the title because of where the line was drawn.

It is also mostly uninhabitable. About 80 per cent is covered by an ice sheet up to three kilometres thick, which contains enough water to raise global sea level by around seven metres and whose weight has pressed the middle of the island into a basin below sea level. The population is around 56,000, almost all of it on the ice-free southwestern coast.

The name is one of the oldest pieces of misleading advertising on record. Erik the Red, exiled from Iceland for killing several people, named it Greenland on the explicit reasoning - reported in the sagas - that people would be more willing to go somewhere with an attractive name. The Norse settlements he founded lasted about 450 years and then vanished, for reasons still argued over: cooling climate, soil exhaustion, the collapse of the walrus-ivory trade they depended on, and a refusal to adopt Inuit hunting methods all feature in the arguments.