The True Size of Countries

By Lucian — builder & engineer, LK Forge

On the world map most of us grew up with, Greenland looms as large as a continent. It isn't close. We took the real land areas behind our World Atlas, ranked them, and worked out exactly how much the familiar map stretches the truth — and why.

The real ranking

Sort every country by land area and the top of the list holds no surprises — until the bottom. Greenland, which looks continental on the map, sits at number 12, just behind two African countries. Areas in millions of km²:

All of Africa — 50 countries — comes to about 30.3 million km². That is 14 times Greenland's 2.17 million, and 1.8 times Russia, the largest country on Earth. The map that makes Greenland rival Africa, and Russia dwarf it, is off by an order of magnitude.

Why the map lies: latitude

The culprit is the Mercator projection. To keep compass directions straight, it stretches the map east–west by a factor that grows toward the poles — and stretches it north–south by the same factor to stop shapes tearing. Area is scaled by that factor squared: sec²(latitude). Near the equator it's 1 (true to size); near the poles it explodes. That's the whole trick:

Greenland sits around 72°N, where Mercator inflates area more than tenfold — which is exactly why a 2-million-km² island ends up looking like a 30-million-km² continent. Russia and Canada, spread across the far north, are puffed up four-fold. Countries on the equator, like the DR Congo, are drawn true.

The land areas here are the same ones behind our World Atlas, which draws countries on a globe as well as a flat map — so you can see the distortion appear and disappear as you switch between them.