The true size of countries, and why maps get it wrong

Why maps get size wrong

The Earth is round, and a round surface cannot be flattened without stretching it somewhere. The mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss proved this in 1827. The method a map uses to flatten the Earth is called a projection, and every projection has to choose what to get wrong.

The world map many of us grew up with uses the Mercator projection, and the maps behind many websites and apps use a version of it. Mercator gets directions and the shapes of small areas right, and gets size badly wrong. It stretches places more the farther they are from the equator. At 60° north, the latitude of Oslo, Helsinki and the southern tip of Greenland, it draws areas four times too big. Read more about how the Mercator projection works.

The true size of Greenland

Greenland covers about 2.17 million square kilometers (km²), or 836,000 square miles. On a Mercator map it looks about as big as Africa, which covers about 30.3 million km², or 11.7 million square miles. Africa is about 14 times bigger.

Greenland is smaller than Algeria or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and it would fit inside Brazil nearly four times.

The true size of Africa

Africa covers about 30.3 million km², around a fifth of all the land on Earth. It is more than three times the size of the United States, and larger than the United States, China and India put together.

Because Africa sits across the equator, Mercator draws it close to its real size while inflating Europe and North America to its north. That is why Africa looks smaller than it is next to them, and why the United Nations voted in 2026 to encourage maps that show it at its true size. Read about the UN vote on world maps.

The true size of Russia

Russia is the largest country in the world, at about 17.1 million km². But it lies far to the north, so a Mercator map draws it about two and a half times bigger than Africa. In reality, Africa is about 1.8 times the size of Russia.

The true size of Canada, the United States, China and Brazil

These four countries are close in size. Canada covers about 9.98 million km², the United States 9.83 million, China 9.60 million and Brazil 8.52 million.

On a Mercator map, Canada looks bigger than the other three put together. In reality, the United States, China and Brazil together cover about 27.9 million km², nearly three times the size of Canada.

The true size of Antarctica

Antarctica covers about 14.2 million km², bigger than the United States and Mexico put together. A Mercator map cannot show the South Pole at all: the stretching grows without limit toward the pole. Maps that use Mercator cut Antarctica off, or turn its coast into a long band across the bottom of the map.

How much Mercator inflates each place

Mercator shows size correctly only along the equator. The farther a place is from it, the bigger Mercator draws it, compared with a place of the same size on the equator:

Place	True area, million km²	Drawn too big by
Greenland	2.17	16×
Canada	9.98	5.1×
Russia	17.10	4.9×
United Kingdom	0.24	2.9×
United States	9.83	2.3×
China	9.60	1.6×
Australia	7.74	1.3×
India	3.29	1.2×
Africa	30.32	1.1×
Brazil	8.52	1.1×
Democratic Republic of the Congo	2.34	About right

How the numbers were worked out: each place’s area on a Mercator map is compared with its area on the globe, using Natural Earth country outlines at 1:50 million scale. The figure for the United States includes Alaska. True areas are rounded figures from the final edition of The World Factbook, published by the United States Central Intelligence Agency until February 2026. The figure for Africa is the total of its countries.

How to see the true size of a country

There are two fair ways to compare the size of two places. The first is to use an equal-area map, such as the Equal Earth map, which draws every place at its true size compared with every other. The second is to move one place so that it sits the same distance from the equator as the other. Mercator then stretches both by the same amount, and you can compare them directly.

The second way is what TrueWorld Maps does. Pick a country and drag it anywhere on the map. As it moves, it grows or shrinks just as the map around it is stretched, so it is always drawn at the right size for where it sits. Put Greenland next to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and you will see they are about the same size.

See it for yourself

Drag any country across a world map and compare it with another. Greenland, Russia, Canada, Brazil: see how big they really are.

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Sources

1. Country areas: The World Factbook, Central Intelligence Agency, final edition (discontinued in February 2026). Data from the factbook.json archive of The World Factbook.
2. Map outlines: Natural Earth countries at 1:50 million scale, public domain.
3. Map projection formulas: Map Projections: A Working Manual, John P. Snyder, U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 1395, 1987.
4. Gauss’s 1827 proof: Theorema Egregium, Wikipedia.
5. The Equal Earth map projection, B. Šavrič, T. Patterson and B. Jenny, International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 2019.