As a fun exercise we used Google Maps to trace out the US (not including Alaska or Hawaii) to see how close we could get matching the land area as outlined by census.gov.
First let’s look at the actual area and then let’s look how close we got.
How many acres is the US?
- The actual area in acres of the United States is 2,429,914,880 acres
- That’s 2.43 billion acres
- 3,796,742 square miles (9,833,517 square kilometres)
How many acres did we measure the US being using just Google Maps?
- Since we only measured the contiguous USA we first need to subtract Alaska and Hawaii area from the US total
- US total (2.43 billion acres) – Alaska (425,845,760 acres) – Hawaii (6,996,480 acres) = US Mainland Total (1,997,157,760 acres)
- We measured 3,067,961 square miles which is 1,963,495,040 acres
- Not bad. Only off by 33,662,720 acres or 1 South Carolina.
Here’s our trace from Google Maps:
How big is the United States compared to Russia, Canada and Australia?
US size compared to Russia:
US size compared to Australia:
US size compared to Canada:
What are the biggest countries in the world?
- Russia – 17.1 million square km
- Canada – 9.88 million square km
- China – 9.6 million square km
- United States – 9.53 million square km
- Brazil – 8.52 million square km
- Australia – 7.74 million square km
- India – 3.29 million square km
- Argentina – 2.78 million square km
- Kazakhstan – 2.72 million square km
- Algeria – 2.38 million square km
Sourced from World Population Review.
And just to be really stupid since we are a lawn mower website…
How long would it take to mow the USA with a riding mower?
- A regular riding mower from John Deere can go 7.8 mph.
- Fitted with a 36 inch mowing deck width it can mow 1 acre in 18 minutes.
- The contiguous USA is 1,997,157,760 acres.
- 1,997,157,760 acres divided by 18 minutes per acre works out to about 211 years.
- It would take 211 years non-stop to mow the United States if it were 1 big lawn.
