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Feb 25, 2021 · Learn about the geography, history, and culture of Papua New Guinea with maps and facts. See the location, outline, provinces, flag, and key facts of this island nation in Oceania. Explore its physical features, volcanoes, rivers, and regions with regional maps.
Map of Papua New Guinea Share of forest area in total land area, top countries (2021). Papua New Guinea has the eighth highest percentage of forest cover in the world. At 462,840 km 2 (178,704 sq mi), Papua New Guinea is the world's 54th-largest country and the third-largest island country.
Oct 16, 2023 · Find various maps of Papua New Guinea, including political, administrative, physical and location maps. Learn about the facts, capital, population, languages and regions of this Oceania country.
- Overview
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- Drainage and soils
Papua New Guinea, island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It encompasses the eastern half of New Guinea, the world’s second largest island (the western half is made up of the Indonesian provinces of Papua and West Papua); the Bismarck Archipelago (New Britain, New Ireland, the Admiralty Islands, and several others); Bougainville and Buka (part of the Solomon Islands chain); and small offshore islands and atolls. The national capital, Port Moresby, is located in southeastern New Guinea on the Coral Sea.
The islands that constitute Papua New Guinea were settled over a period of 40,000 years by the mixture of peoples who are generally referred to as Melanesians. Since the country achieved independence in 1975, one of its principal challenges has been the difficulty of governing many hundreds of diverse, once-isolated local societies as a viable single nation.
Papua New Guinea stretches from just south of the Equator to the Torres Strait, which separates New Guinea from Cape York Peninsula to the south, the northernmost extension of Australia. Mainland Papua New Guinea reaches its maximum north-south expanse of some 510 miles (820 km) along its western border with Indonesian Papua. Almost completely straight, the boundary is formed primarily by the line of longitude 141° E and curves only briefly westward to follow the Fly River for approximately 50 miles (80 km), starting just southwest of Kiunga.
From the western border the land tapers—with a substantial indentation in the south coast formed by the Gulf of Papua—to a fingerlike shape that points southeast toward the D’Entrecasteaux Islands and the Louisiade Archipelago. Off the mainland are a number of small islands and island groups scattered to the north and east and, farther northeast, Bougainville Island and the Bismarck Archipelago; the latter forms a crescent that arcs from the Admiralty Islands in the north to New Britain and Umboi Island, off the mainland’s Huon Peninsula.
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Papua New Guinea’s magnificent and varied scenery reflects a generally recent geologic history in which movements of the Earth’s crust resulted in the collision of the northward-moving Australian Plate with the westward-moving Pacific Plate. The low-lying plains of southern New Guinea are geologically part of the Australian Plate. Indeed, New Guinea was separated physically from Australia only some 8,000 years ago by the shallow flooding of the Torres Strait. The southern New Guinea plains, called the Fly-Digul shelf (named for the Fly and Digul rivers), are geologically stable.
Northward lies a belt of limestone country of varying width, most prominent in the Kikori River–Lake Kutubu area. This forms an extraordinarily harsh environment of jumbled karst, dolines, rock towers, and seemingly endless ridges of jagged rock, all covered in virtually impenetrable lowland rainforest.
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A mountainous zone called the Highlands, extending from the west to the southeast, occupies the central part of the island of New Guinea. In Papua New Guinea those mountains reach elevations in excess of 13,000 feet (4,000 metres), rising to the country’s highest point of 14,793 feet (4,509 metres) at Mount Wilhelm in the Bismarck Range, part of the Central Range. The Highlands also feature enclosed upland basins whose floors are usually at 4,500 feet (1,370 metres) or higher. The basins contain lake deposits, formed in the recent geologic past by impeded drainage; soil wash from the surrounding mountains; and layers of volcanic ash, or tephra, deposited from nearby volcanoes, some of them recently active. Such basins, therefore, are usually very fertile.
The north coast of the mainland, unlike the swampy south coast, drops sharply to the sea. The country’s most northerly zone consists of a complex unstable volcanic arc in the Bismarck Sea stretching southeastward from the Schouten Islands (not to be confused with the Indonesian island group of the same name) to the Huon Peninsula and eastward through the island of New Britain. There the arc bifurcates, one arm sweeping northwestward through New Ireland and the Admiralty Islands, the other proceeding southeastward through Buka, Bougainville, and the country of Solomon Islands.
Steeply sloping mountain areas, exceptionally heavy rainfall, geologic instability in all except the most southerly areas, and the rapid growth of both population and commercial enterprise have combined to create some of the highest soil-erosion rates in the world, rivaling those of the Himalaya region. Consequently, while rivers are usually quite ...
Papua New Guinea Map - Oceania. Oceania. Papua New Guinea. The Independent State of Papua New Guinea comprises the eastern part of the world's largest and highest tropical island, New Guinea, together with many smaller offshore islands. papuanewguinea.travel. Wikivoyage. Wikipedia. Photo: Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 3.0.
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The geography of Papua New Guinea describes the eastern half of the island of New Guinea, the islands of New Ireland, New Britain and Bougainville, and smaller nearby islands. Together these make up the nation of Papua New Guinea in tropical Oceania, located in the western edge of the Pacific Ocean.
Learn about the geography, natural resources, natural hazards and environmental issues of Papua New Guinea with maps and satellite images. See where Papua New Guinea is located in Oceania, its bordering countries, cities, lakes, rivers and mountains. Explore the country using Google Earth or a laminated map of Australia.
