What is the true size of Africa?
The United States, China, India, Mexico, Peru and Greenland fit inside Africa at the same time, with room to spare: together they come to about 93% of it. Africa straddles the equator, where Mercator shrinks things, while most of those countries lie far from it, where Mercator inflates them. Africa is also about three times the size of Europe.
What fits inside Africa?
Africa covers about 30.4 million km². The United States is 9.8 million, China 9.6, India 3.3, Greenland 2.2, Mexico 2.0 and Peru 1.3 — six countries on four continents, and laid together they still leave a gap. Add Algeria and the arithmetic runs out. The comparison is old and well known, and it is almost always presented as a diagram you have to take on trust; here the outlines are the real ones, drawn at the scale the numbers describe, so the claim and the picture are the same object.
Is Greenland really as big as Africa?
No. Greenland is about 2.2 million km² against Africa's 30.4 million, so roughly one fourteenth of it. It is smaller than Algeria. The Mercator projection inflates land far from the equator, which is why the two look comparable on most world maps, and why this page draws them at one honest scale instead.
How big is Africa compared to Europe?
About three times. Africa is roughly 30.4 million km² against Europe's 10.2 million, so Europe would fit inside Africa three times over with a country's worth of room left. A Mercator world map shows them far closer than that, because Europe sits at high latitude where the projection stretches area hardest and Africa sits across the equator where it stretches nothing.
Every figure on this page
| Unit | Area (km²) | Share of land | Outline vs figure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Africa | 30,370,000 | 20.2% | +1.1% |
| Europe | 10,180,000 | 6.8% | +2.7% |
| United States of America | 9,833,517 | 6.5% | +3.6% |
| China | 9,596,961 | 6.4% | +2.0% |
| Brazil | 8,515,767 | 5.7% | -0.3% |
| Australia | 7,692,024 | 5.1% | -0.1% |
| India | 3,287,263 | 2.2% | +4.3% |
| Argentina | 2,780,400 | 1.8% | -0.1% |
| Algeria | 2,381,741 | 1.6% | +2.7% |
| Greenland | 2,166,086 | 1.4% | -1.1% |
| Mexico | 1,964,375 | 1.3% | -0.5% |
| Peru | 1,285,216 | 0.9% | -2.3% |
Why do world maps show the wrong sizes?
Mercator-style world maps distort area badly, which is why Greenland is usually drawn about the size of Africa when it is closer to one fourteenth of it. Every outline on this page is projected with Lambert Azimuthal Equal-Area, centred on its own centroid, and every layer shares one kilometre-to-screen scale. Area on screen is therefore proportional to real area: what looks bigger is bigger. Each outline is scaled by a small fit factor so its drawn area matches the published figure, and that geometry is checked against those figures automatically.
Why does the outline disagree with the figure?
The last column is the gap between the two numbers behind every slab. The outline comes from Natural Earth's 110m coastline; the area is the published figure that outline is drawn to. They rarely match, so each shape is scaled by a small factor until its drawn area equals the published one — and that factor is what the column reports.
Most of the gap is coarseness: a 110m coastline cuts corners, and cutting corners loses area. That accounts for the small positive numbers, and it is why almost everything here needs nudging up. Seven shapes go the other way and are drawn slightly too large, which the same correction shrinks. Two cases are not coarseness at all. Antarctica's 16% is a definition: the coastline encloses the grounded ice sheet, about 12.2 million km², while the published 14.2 million counts the floating Ross and Ronne-Filchner shelves, which no coastline encloses. India's 4.3% is Kashmir — Natural Earth assigns Gilgit-Baltistan and Azad Kashmir to Pakistan, and the published Indian figure includes them.
For the rest, the honest answer is that this page does not know. Saudi Arabia's 11.7% is the largest gap among the countries and no specific cause is claimed for it here. The column is published rather than hidden because a correction applied silently is the kind of thing that stops being questioned.
How to use it
Drag to orbit the stack. Scroll or pinch in to peel down through it one layer at a time, digging from the smallest continent to the largest. Click any name, in the legend or on a label, to hide that layer. The comparison panel re-expresses every area as a multiple of whichever layer you have surfaced. Nothing to install, and it works offline.
Outlines from Natural Earth 110m. Areas cross-checked against published figures. Contested boundaries (Siberia, Sinai, Thrace, Kazakhstan) are stated rather than hidden, with the cost of each decision documented. The projection is Lambert Azimuthal Equal-Area, computed per landmass about its own centroid.