The real size of countries

What are the 20 largest countries by real area?

Russia, Canada, the United States, China and Brazil, and then Australia, which is a continent on its own. The 20 largest countries cover 68 percent of the land of all 196 countries.

Some of these will not match your mental picture. India, seventh, is smaller than Australia and about a third of China. Kazakhstan, ninth, is bigger than any country in Western Europe several times over. Algeria and DR Congo are each bigger than Greenland, and Saudi Arabia is about the same size as it. The full ranking by area, population and GDP is here.

What does "area" include?

The figure almost every ranking uses is total area, which counts land plus inland water: lakes, reservoirs and rivers. Land area leaves the water out. For most countries the two are within a few percent, but for a few they change the order of the list.

Canada is second in the world by total area and fourth by land area, because 891,163 km² of it is fresh water, more than any other country. China's land area is larger than the United States', while its total area is smaller. None of the sources agree to the last square kilometre: the United States counts coastal and territorial waters differently from the UN, and China's and India's figures depend on which disputed areas are included. Perspective Map uses total area from the UN Statistics Division, with the CIA World Factbook where the UN has no figure, and the same numbers are behind every comparison on this site.

How much does Google Maps stretch each country?

A lot, and by different amounts. Google Maps uses the Mercator projection, which multiplies a country's apparent area by roughly 1 ÷ cos²(latitude). At the equator that is 1. At 60°N it is 4. At 72°N, the middle of Greenland, it is about 10.

The table gives the real area of 15 countries, the latitude of their centre, and the area Mercator makes them look. The last column is what your eye sees on Google Maps.

So Canada, at its real 9.98 million km², looks like 39.9 million km² on the map, more than twice the United States' apparent 16.5 million km², when the real gap is 2 percent. Greenland looks bigger than China. The United Kingdom is stretched 2.9 times more than DR Congo, which is really 9.6 times bigger than the United Kingdom. Why Google Maps does this is a longer story.

Which countries look smaller than they really are?

Nothing is shrunk on a Mercator map, but everything near the equator is stretched much less than everything far from it, so in comparison the tropics look small. The countries that lose the most are the big ones on or near the equator: Brazil, DR Congo, Indonesia, India, Nigeria, Ethiopia and Colombia. Africa as a whole, 30.0 million km², is stretched only about 1.2 times on average and ends up looking like Greenland's neighbour instead of 14 times its size.

Real size by population and GDP

Area is one way to size a country. On Perspective Map the same boxes can show population, where India becomes the largest country and Russia shrinks to the size of Bangladesh, or GDP, where the United States and China take up 42 percent of the world. Switch between them and watch the boxes change. Most populated countries and largest economies have the rankings.