How big are Greenland and Russia in comparison to Africa?

How big are Greenland and Russia in comparison to Africa?

by Jakub Marian

We are all used to see­ing the fol­low­ing kind of maps in Google Maps and other map pro­viders (this one, in par­tic­u­lar, is taken from Google Maps). Were you ever won­der­ing how huge Green­land was? If we just take the shape of Green­land and put it over Africa, it looks like a huge desert of snow:

So, is Green­land really so big? The prob­lem is that (un­like some of us be­lieve) the Earth has a spher­ical shape. In order to dis­play a spher­ical sur­face on a com­puter screen, it has to be de­formed (un­less you have a spher­ical com­puter screen).

There are sev­eral ways you can pro­ject a sphere onto a flat screen, each hav­ing its ad­vant­ages and dis­ad­vant­ages. Google Maps uses (something close to) theMer­cator pro­jec­tion (ima­gine wrap­ping a cyl­in­der around the Earth which touches it at the Equator and draw­ing the map slice by slice).

This pro­jec­tion has some nice prop­er­ties; it is con­formal, which means that all angles on your flat screen look the same as on the ori­ginal sphere. However, this is done at the cost of dis­tort­ing areas: The fur­ther from the Equator we look, the big­ger everything ap­pears to be.

This is es­pe­cially true for Green­land be­cause of its very north­ern lat­it­ude. To see how big it really is, I’ve taken the shape of Green­land from the map above and res­ized it to its proper size:

Not that im­press­ive any­more, is it? Something sim­ilar hap­pens with Rus­sia. Would you be­lieve that Africa is al­most twice as large as Rus­sia (in terms of area)? When we scale down the shape of Rus­sia, de­form it to a shape truer to its real spher­ical shape and put it over Africa, we get: