Actual size of countries

How to use the map

Tap or click a country: a colored copy of it detaches from the map. Drag the copy to another place and compare it with the surrounding countries. To choose by name, use the search above the map.

Near the equator, the copy shrinks; near the poles, it grows. The country’s area stays the same: what changes is the map’s distortion at each latitude.

Several countries can remain on the map at the same time, each in a different color. To zoom in, use the + and − buttons or the mouse wheel; to move the map, drag the background.

Why the map deceives

The Mercator projection was created by the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569 for navigation. In it, a course of constant bearing appears as a straight line, which made it easier to plot a ship’s route with a compass.

To achieve that, the map preserves angles and the shapes of places seen up close, but it stretches everything the farther it is from the equator. At 60 degrees latitude, near Oslo or Anchorage, distances appear twice as large and areas about four times larger. The poles don’t even fit on the map: they would be stretched without limit.

Many online maps use a variant of this projection because it allows you to zoom in on any place without distorting streets and city blocks. That’s why, on the world map most people know, countries near the equator look smaller than they really are compared with those near the far north and far south.

Comparisons that surprise

Greenland, at about 2.2 million km², looks the size of Africa on the Mercator map. Africa has about 30 million km²: roughly 14 Greenlands would fit inside it.

Russia is the largest country in the world, at about 17.1 million km², but Africa is almost twice that area.

Alaska appears larger than Mexico, but it is about 1.7 million km², compared with nearly 2 million km² for Mexico.

Antarctica appears as a huge strip at the bottom of the map. On Earth it is about 14 million km², less than half the area of Africa.

Is there a distortion-free map?

Not on paper or a flat screen. Projecting the surface of a sphere onto a plane always distorts something: areas, shapes, distances or directions. Each projection chooses what to preserve.

Equal-area projections, like Gall-Peters, show countries at their correct size but squash and stretch shapes. Others, like Robinson and Winkel Tripel, distribute the errors so the world map looks more balanced. Only the globe shows everything in true proportion.