You’ve probably seen that viral clip of someone sliding Greenland over Africa. It shrinks. It doesn’t just get a little smaller; it practically disappears. Honestly, the first time I saw a map with real sizes, it felt like my entire elementary school education was a lie. We grow up looking at the Mercator projection in classrooms, thinking South America and Europe are roughly the same size. They aren't. Not even close.
South America is nearly double the size of Europe.
Maps are liars. Well, maybe that’s harsh. Maps are actually just mathematical compromises. You can’t peel an orange and flatten the skin into a perfect rectangle without tearing it or stretching it. To keep the lines of latitude and longitude straight for sailors—which was the whole point back in 1569 when Gerardus Mercator designed his famous map—you have to stretch the areas near the poles. The further you get from the Equator, the more the land gets distorted. This is why Alaska looks like it could swallow the United States whole, when in reality, you could fit Alaska into the "lower 48" about five times over.
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The Mercator problem and why we still use it
It’s easy to get mad at Mercator. People often argue that the distortion creates a "Eurocentric" world view because it makes northern, wealthier nations look massive and imposing while shrinking the Global South. While that’s a valid sociological critique, the original reason was purely functional. If you’re a 16th-century navigator trying to cross the Atlantic, you need a map where a straight line on the paper represents a constant compass bearing. Mercator does that.
But we aren't all 16th-century sailors anymore.
When you look at a map with real sizes, like the Gall-Peters projection or the AuthaGraph, the world looks "wrong." Africa becomes this absolute behemoth. It is roughly 30 million square kilometers. You can fit the United States, China, India, Japan, and most of Europe inside Africa’s borders, and you’d still have room left over. That is the reality of our planet's geography that most digital interfaces still fail to show us because they rely on Web Mercator for tiling and zooming logic.
Google Maps and Apple Maps actually changed their desktop versions a few years ago. If you zoom out far enough now, you see a 3D globe. This was a massive win for geographical literacy. However, on your phone screen, it’s still usually a flat Mercator projection because it’s easier for the processor to render flat tiles than a sphere in real-time while you’re trying to find the nearest Taco Bell.
The True Size Of is the rabbit hole you need
If you want to spend three hours questioning everything, go to The True Size Of. It’s a web tool created by James Talmage and Damon Maneice. It lets you drag countries around and watch them scale in real-time based on their latitude.
It's addictive.
Try dragging the Democratic Republic of the Congo up to Europe. It covers almost everything from London to Warsaw. Or take Brazil and put it over the United States; they are surprisingly similar in size, yet on a standard wall map, the US often looks much larger. Greenland is the biggest offender, though. On a Mercator map, it looks roughly the size of Africa. In reality? Africa is fourteen times larger than Greenland. Greenland is actually smaller than Algeria.
Why the AuthaGraph might be the "truest" map with real sizes
In 1999, a Japanese architect named Hajime Narukawa released something called the AuthaGraph. This is probably the closest we have ever come to a map with real sizes that doesn't completely sacrifice shape. Narukawa divided the spherical surface of the Earth into 96 triangles, projected them onto a tetrahedron, and then unfolded it into a rectangle.
The result? It looks chaotic at first.
The oceans aren't where you expect them to be. The orientation is tilted. But the landmasses? They are incredibly accurate in terms of area. It won the Good Design Grand Award in Japan because it solved a 450-year-old problem. It allows the world map to be tiled in any direction without visible seams, meaning you can see the path of a satellite or a plane without the "edge of the world" cutting the line.
But even the AuthaGraph has its critics. No map is perfect. If you want perfect area, you lose shape. If you want perfect shape, you lose distance. It’s a "pick your poison" situation in cartography. This is known as the "Metric Distortion" problem. You're trying to project a 3D manifold ($S^2$) onto a 2D plane ($\mathbb{R}^2$), and Gauss's Theorema Egregium basically proves that you can't do this without some kind of distortion.
The psychological impact of seeing the world correctly
Does it actually matter if we think Greenland is huge?
Maybe.
Geographical importance is often subconsciously linked to physical size. When we see a map with real sizes, our perception of geopolitics shifts. We start to realize just how massive the "middle" of the world is. We see that India is a subcontinent that could swallow half of Europe. We realize that Indonesia spans a distance roughly equivalent to the width of the United States.
Cartographers like Arno Peters, who championed the Gall-Peters map in the 1970s, argued that the Mercator map was a tool of colonialism. He believed that by shrinking the tropics, the map diminished the perceived importance of the people living there. While his map is famously ugly—it makes the continents look like "wet laundry" hanging on a line—the intent was to force a conversation about fairness.
How to actually see the "Real" world today
If you're tired of the distortions and want to see a map with real sizes for yourself, you don't have to go buy a vintage globe—though globes are the only 100% accurate way to view the Earth.
Instead, look into these specific projections:
- The Mollweide Projection: This is an equal-area, pseudocylindrical map. It's great for seeing global distributions (like climate data) because it keeps the area ratios correct, even if it squishes the shapes at the edges.
- The Eckert IV: Another equal-area map that looks a bit more "rounded" and friendly than the Gall-Peters. It’s often used in textbooks that actually care about size accuracy.
- The Waterman Butterfly: This one is just beautiful. It looks like a butterfly-shaped cutout. It keeps both shapes and sizes remarkably well, but it’s hard to read for navigation because the oceans are all chopped up.
Honestly, the best thing you can do is just stop trusting your wall map. Treat it like a diagram, not a photo. The Earth is far more crowded at the equator and far less empty at the bottom than you think. Antarctica, for instance, is often shown as a giant white strip at the bottom of the map. In a map with real sizes, it’s a distinct circular continent that is larger than Australia but smaller than South America.
Actionable insights for the map-curious
Start by changing your default digital view. If you use Google Earth, you're already ahead of the game because it uses a virtual globe.
Next, if you're a designer or a teacher, stop using the Mercator projection for anything other than a literal "how to get from point A to point B" navigation tool. For infographics or data visualization, use the Robinson or Winkel Tripel projections. These are "compromise" maps—they don't get the sizes 100% perfect, but they don't mess them up nearly as badly as Mercator does. National Geographic adopted the Winkel Tripel as its standard back in 1998 for exactly this reason.
Finally, go play with "The True Size Of." Search for your home country and drag it to the equator. Then drag it to the North Pole. Watching it grow and shrink in your hands is the fastest way to unlearn years of geographical misconceptions. You'll never look at a standard world map the same way again. It's a weird feeling, realizing the world looks nothing like you thought it did, but it's a necessary one if you want to understand the true scale of our planet.
Check your favorite news site's maps next time there is a global event. If they are still using a stretched-out Mercator to show "global impact," you'll know they aren't giving you the full picture. Accuracy in size leads to accuracy in perspective. That’s why a map with real sizes isn’t just a gimmick; it’s a reality check.