How many continents are there?
Between four and seven, depending on where you went to school. The count is a teaching convention rather than a measurement: Europe and Asia sit on one landmass with no ocean between them, and the dividing line along the Urals is cultural and roughly 2,500 years old. This page draws every model that is actually taught and lets you switch between them.
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.
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.
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.
What is the largest country by area?
Russia, at about 17.1 million km², is nearly twice the next-largest country and outweighs every continent except Asia and Africa. Greenland, the shape a world map exaggerates most, is smaller than Algeria. The 24 countries over 1.2 million km² together account for roughly two thirds of all land.
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.