Is Greenland actually as big as Africa: the flaws of the Mercator projection

Let me tell you why the most common maps in the world tend to be extremely misleading.

What’s wrong about this image? It looks perfectly fine, right? This is a pretty standard world map that tells us a lot about the planet we inhabit. It labels the continents, the oceans, the mountains, and the seas. It accurately tells us how to get from point A to point B (direction is conserved). But what it fails to conserve is size. See Greenland? It’s HUGE. But how big is it in reality? Well, let’s compare Greenland to some other countries to find out.

Greenland compared to other large countries

Let’s go back to the map that we have above. The most prominent example of size and shape being distorted is Greenland. It appears as though Greenland takes a size and shape resembling Africa! That makes it GINORMOUS. But Greenland’s not that big. Of course, it’s big when compared to a majority of countries, but it’s definitely not as big as this map makes it look. Let me show you what I mean.

Countries that appear smaller than Greenland on the map are actually larger. Take a look at Australia. The Mercator projection makes Australia look pretty small, right? In reality, its size completely dominates Greenland’s. If Greenland looks a lot bigger than it is on this projection, does that mean all of the northern countries are inflated in size? Why don’t we answer this by taking a look at the largest country in the world?

Russia versus the world

Russia is the undisputed largest country in the world in terms of total area, land area, and water area. It looks MUCH MUCH MUCH larger than any other country on this map. But is it really that much bigger than other countries?

It seems to be a lot bigger than the other three largest countries in the world (by land area). However, the extent to which the map makes Russia look large is still overdone. But why?

Why Mercator?

If the Mercator projection completely messes up the scale of the sizes of different countries, why use it? Invented in 1569 by cartographer Geradus Mercator, the Mercator projection was primarily intended to help with navigation. The map held the very useful property of conserving lines of direction. This meant that connecting two points on the map with a line would put you in the same direction that a compass would. Back then, this was a very useful aspect to any map. Since then, Mercator’s projection has been adopted by numerous world maps used in schools and institutions around the world.

Conclusion

It is impossible to convert the surface of a sphere into a 2d rectangle while maintaining all aspects of the original surface. This is the problem that older cartographers attempted to solve as best as possible. Some cartographers attempted to conserve direction, others size, and others altitude. Regardless of how the maps were designed, it’s important to note that each map had its own purpose and functionality. With that, I’ll leave all of you and hope to see you tomorrow!