How to see the true size of a country

Why can't you see the true size on a normal map?

Because a flat map of a round planet has to stretch something, and the map everyone uses, Mercator, stretches area. The stretch grows with distance from the equator. At 45° a country appears twice its real area, at 60° four times, and at 72°, the middle of Greenland, about 10 times. Countries near the equator are barely touched. So Greenland (2.17 million km²) looks as big as Africa (30.0 million km²), and Canada looks bigger than the United States, China and Brazil put together.

The number in a table does not have this problem, but numbers are hard to picture. What you want is a picture where the area on the screen matches the area on the ground. Three tools do that.

Way 1: Perspective Map (boxes to scale)

Perspective Map draws each of the 196 countries as a box, and the area of the box is exactly proportional to the country's real area. Twice the land, twice the box. Nothing is projected, so nothing is stretched. Here is how to check a country:

1. Open perspectivemaps.com. The map opens showing the whole world by area, largest countries top left.
2. Type the country's name in the Find box at the top. The map zooms to its box and the side panel shows its area, its rank in the world and its share of the world's land, plus the country closest to it in size.
3. Add a second country in the Compare panel to see the two side by side, drawn to scale, with the ratio between them.
4. Use Show to narrow the map to a continent, and drop the country in as a guest to see where it would rank there. Mexico dropped into Africa lands in 3rd place by area.
5. Switch to the Atlas view to see the boxes at their real locations on an equal-area map, then click the Google map tab to see the same boxes on Mercator. Flip between the two and watch the north shrink.

The same boxes can show population, density, GDP per person and total GDP, which outlines cannot. Switch the measure at the top and the boxes resize. Every view has a Share link and an Export image button.

Way 2: The True Size Of (drag the outline)

The True Size Of (thetruesize.com), made by James Talmage and Damon Maneice in 2013, is the tool that made the Greenland comparison famous. You type a country's name, and its outline appears on a Google-style Mercator map. Then you drag the outline somewhere else, and the site rescales it as it moves, so dragging Greenland down to the equator shrinks it to its true relative size. Dragging is a good way to feel the distortion for yourself.

Its limits: it only does area, it only compares shapes you have dragged on top of each other, and rotated outlines are hard to compare by eye. It does not give you a ratio or a ranking. We built Perspective Map partly because we wanted the ratio.

Way 3: Google Earth (a globe)

Google Earth (earth.google.com, or the app) shows the planet as a 3D globe, so there is no projection and no distortion. Spin it so the two countries you care about are both facing you, and you see their true relative size. The limit is that you can only see half the planet at once, and countries on the far side are foreshortened, so it works for neighbours and not for Greenland versus Australia. A physical globe does the same job.

Which way should you use?

Use the outline tool once to understand the problem, and the boxes when you want an answer. For the numbers behind either, the UN Statistics Division and the CIA World Factbook publish total area for every country, and those are the figures Perspective Map uses.

Example: is Greenland bigger than India?

No. India is 3,287,263 km² and Greenland 2,166,086 km², so India is 1.5 times bigger. On Google Maps, Greenland's centre is at 72°N and India's at about 22°N, so Greenland is stretched about 10 times and India about 1.2 times. The map ends up showing Greenland at about 5.9 times India's size, when the truth is the other way round. India also has 1.46 billion people to Greenland's 56,830.