Syndicated from the original on lkforge.com. The country data is the same set behind my World Atlas, and the script that prints every number below is public and dependency-free.
On September 4, 2026 the UN General Assembly backed a push to retire the Mercator projection - the world map most of us grew up with - in favor of equal-area maps. The complaint is old but correct: Mercator badly misrepresents size. I wanted the actual numbers, so I took the real land areas behind my World Atlas and measured it.
The headline: Greenland is not the size of Africa
On a Mercator map they look about equal. They are not close.
- Africa is 14.0x larger than Greenland (30.3M km2 across 50 countries vs 2.17M km2).
- Africa is 1.8x larger than Russia (17.1M km2), the biggest country on Earth.
- Greenland is only the 12th-largest landmass on the list. Algeria alone (2.38M km2) is bigger than Greenland.
The real top of the ranking (millions of km2)
| # | Country | Area |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Russia | 17.1 |
| 2 | Canada | 10.0 |
| 3 | China | 9.7 |
| 4 | United States | 9.4 |
| 5 | Brazil | 8.5 |
| ... | ... | ... |
| 10 | Algeria | 2.4 |
| 11 | DR Congo | 2.3 |
| 12 | Greenland | 2.2 |
Why the map lies, in one formula
Mercator keeps compass directions straight, and the price is size. It stretches the map by a factor that grows toward the poles, on both axes - so area is scaled by that factor squared:
Mercator area inflation = sec^2(latitude)
Evaluate it at each country's centroid latitude and the whole illusion falls out:
| Country | Centroid lat | Area shown on Mercator |
|---|---|---|
| Greenland | 72 N | x10.5 |
| Russia | 60 N | x4.0 |
| Canada | 60 N | x4.0 |
| United States | 38 N | x1.6 |
| DR Congo | 0 | x1.0 |
| Brazil | 10 S | x1.0 |
Greenland sits near 72 N, where Mercator inflates area more than tenfold - which is exactly how a 2-million-km2 island ends up looking like a 30-million-km2 continent. Countries on the equator are drawn true to size.
Reproduce it
Every figure here is printed by one short script that fetches the same country dataset (area + centroid latitude) my World Atlas ships and does the arithmetic - no dependencies. The centroid-latitude distortion is a per-country approximation, since a country spans latitudes, but it captures the effect.
The full write-up, with the ranked chart and the distortion table, is on the original: The True Size of Countries. You can watch the distortion appear and vanish by switching between the flat map and the globe in the atlas itself.
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