Why is Greenland so big on maps?
Because the Mercator projection trades area away to get angles right. It was built in 1569 for navigation, and it does one thing no simpler projection does: a straight line drawn across it is a constant compass bearing, which is exactly what a sailor needs. The price is paid in area, stretched by the square of the secant of the latitude — nothing at the equator, about double by 45°, and without limit approaching the poles. Greenland lies between roughly 60° and 84° north, which is close to the worst case the projection has to offer.
How big is Greenland really?
About 2.2 million km², against Africa's 30.4 million: roughly one fourteenth of it rather than the near-equal a world map implies. It is smaller than Algeria, a country the same maps draw as a fraction of its size. Every outline on this page is projected equal-area at one shared scale, so the comparison is the drawing itself and not a caption attached to one.
Where does Greenland rank among countries?
Twelfth among the 24 largest — below Algeria and the DR Congo, above Saudi Arabia and Mexico. A world map suggests something in the top two. That gap between the impression and the rank is the clearest single demonstration of what the projection does to area, which is why Greenland is the shape the argument is almost always made with.
Which map projection should be used instead?
It depends what the map is for, and that is the honest answer rather than a hedge: no flat map preserves area, angle and distance at once, so every projection is a choice about which to sacrifice. Mercator is the right tool for plotting a bearing and the wrong one for comparing countries. Where size is the point — this page, and most thematic maps — an equal-area projection is the one that will not lie about it. The outlines here use Lambert Azimuthal Equal-Area, computed per landmass about its own centroid.
Every figure on this page
| Unit | Area (km²) | Share of land | Outline vs figure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Africa | 30,370,000 | 20.2% | +1.1% |
| Russia | 17,098,246 | 11.4% | +1.0% |
| Canada | 9,984,670 | 6.6% | +0.0% |
| 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% |
| Algeria | 2,381,741 | 1.6% | +2.7% |
| Democratic Republic of the Congo | 2,344,858 | 1.6% | +0.5% |
| Greenland | 2,166,086 | 1.4% | -1.1% |
| Saudi Arabia | 2,149,690 | 1.4% | +11.7% |
| 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.