How Big Is Greenland, Really? Country Sizes Without the Mercator Map
On most wall maps Greenland looks about as big as Africa. Africa is fourteen times larger. The true sizes of countries, the geometry that stretches the ones near the poles, and the comparisons that catch nearly everyone out.
Introduction
Most of us learned the shape of the world from a map that gets the size of almost everything wrong. The Mercator projection, drawn in 1569 for sailors, is still the default picture of the Earth on classroom walls and on most web maps when you zoom in. It keeps the shape of every coastline and the direction of every compass bearing correct, which is exactly what a navigator needs, and the price is that it inflates everything the further it gets from the equator. Here is what the countries look like once you take the stretch away.
Greenland Is One Fourteenth of Africa
On a Mercator map, Greenland and Africa look roughly the same size. Greenland's total area is 2,166,086 square kilometres. Africa's is about 30.4 million. Africa is fourteen times bigger, big enough to hold Greenland and still have room for the United States, China and India. Greenland is still the largest island on Earth, but it is nowhere close to a continent.
Why the Map Stretches the North
The Mercator projection enlarges distances by a factor that grows with latitude, the secant of the latitude, so areas are enlarged by the square of that. At the equator the factor is one and nothing changes. At 60 degrees north, the latitude of Oslo and the southern tip of Greenland, areas are drawn four times too large. At 72 degrees they are drawn about ten and a half times too large, and at Greenland's northern tip, above 83 degrees, about eighty times. The map cannot show the poles at all, because at 90 degrees the stretch is infinite.
That is why the distortion never feels obvious. Every country looks like its own shape, and the stretch builds up gradually with distance from the equator, so the wrong sizes read as natural.
Countries Near the Equator Are Bigger Than They Look
The flip side of an inflated north is an equator that looks small. The Democratic Republic of the Congo covers 2,344,858 square kilometres, which makes it bigger than Greenland, though on a Mercator map it looks like a fraction of it. Mexico, at 1,964,375 square kilometres, and Indonesia, at 1,904,569, are both very nearly Greenland-sized. India, at 3,287,263 square kilometres, is half again as large as Greenland, and looks smaller.
Brazil is another surprise. Its official area is 8,509,361 square kilometres, which makes it slightly larger than the contiguous United States, the lower 48 states, at about 8.08 million. Australia, at 7,688,287 square kilometres, is slightly smaller than the lower 48.
Russia and Canada Really Are Huge
The Mercator map exaggerates the far north, but it does not invent it. Russia is 17,098,242 square kilometres, far and away the largest country on Earth, and Canada is 9,984,670. What the map gets wrong is their size relative to everything else. Russia looks larger than Africa on a Mercator map. In reality Africa is almost 1.8 times the size of Russia.
Alaska Is Two and a Half Texases
Alaska and Texas are the classic American argument, and Alaska wins comfortably. Its total area is 1,723,337 square kilometres against Texas's 695,662, so it is about two and a half times the size, according to the US Census Bureau. Alaska is larger than Iran or Mongolia and only a little smaller than Libya. On a Mercator map it also looks as if it could swallow a good share of the lower 48, which it cannot: the lower 48 states are almost five times its size.
Texas, meanwhile, is bigger than most people expect from the other direction. It is almost three times the size of the whole United Kingdom, at 243,610 square kilometres, and larger than France.
The Moon Is Only Slightly Bigger Than Africa
One last comparison that sounds wrong and is not. From NASA's figure for the Moon's mean radius, 1,737.4 kilometres, its entire surface works out at about 37.9 million square kilometres. That is only about a quarter more than Africa. The continent is far larger than any flat map makes it look.
Why Area Is Hard to Judge by Eye
Even without a distorted map, people are bad at comparing areas. In S. S. Stevens's classic measurements of perception, the apparent size of an area grows more slowly than its real size, so a shape twice as large does not look twice as large. The result is that large areas are consistently guessed too small, and the Mercator map, which makes the northern countries look large enough already, reinforces the mistake rather than correcting it.
If you want to see it for yourself, The True Size Of lets you drag a country across a Mercator map and watch it shrink or swell as it changes latitude. To practise judging areas directly, Size It Up has hundreds of countries, states and lakes, sized beside one you already know, and our guide to getting better at Size It Up explains how its area rounds are scored. And if the problem is less "how big" than "where", MapTap asks you to place a city on the globe. For sizes you can stand next to, see how big famous monuments really are.
Sources
US Census Bureau, state area measurements.
Britannica, Africa.
John P. Snyder, Map Projections: A Working Manual (USGS Professional Paper 1395, 1987).
NASA, Moon fact sheet.
Geoscience Australia, area of Australia.
CIA World Factbook, 2025 edition (archived) for country areas; IBGE for the area of Brazil.
Stevens, S. S., Psychophysics: Introduction to Its Perceptual, Neural, and Social Prospects (Wiley, 1975).
About the author
Emma co-founded Daily to turn the simple puzzles she loved as a kid into a shared daily ritual. She grew up racing through word and logic games and still believes the best ones are equal parts nostalgia and genuine challenge.