The true size of countries

Greenland and Africa, the classic case

On the map hanging in most classrooms, Greenland and Africa look about the same size. Greenland covers 2.2 million square kilometres. Africa covers 30 million. Africa is roughly fourteen times larger, and you could lay Greenland inside Algeria alone with room to spare.

The error is not in the data. It is in the drawing. Every flat map of a round planet has to distort something, and the most common one distorts area.

What actually fits inside Africa

Africa is large enough to contain the United States, China, India, Japan and most of Europe at the same time, with a few million square kilometres still unused. The combined area of those is close to 29 million square kilometres, against 30 million for Africa.

Nobody guesses this from a classroom map, because on that map Europe alone looks like a serious rival.

Pairs that surprise almost everyone

• Madagascar covers about 587,000 square kilometres, mainland France about 551,000. The island is bigger.
• Texas covers about 696,000 square kilometres, France about 551,000. Texas is bigger than France.
• Brazil is larger than the contiguous United States: 8.5 million square kilometres against 8.1 million.
• Russia covers 17 million square kilometres, more than the whole of South America, and spans eleven time zones.
• Indonesia stretches about 5,100 kilometres from end to end, wider than the United States.

Length is not area

Chile runs about 4,300 kilometres from north to south and averages less than 200 kilometres across. It is long, not large: its area, around 756,000 square kilometres, is close to Mozambique, which looks nothing like it on a map.

This is why comparing two countries by eye goes wrong so often. A shape that is long and thin reads as bigger than a compact shape of the same area.

A better way to judge

• Anchor on one country you know well, and ask how many times it fits.
• Remember the latitude. The further a country sits from the equator on a classroom map, the more it has been inflated.
• Check whether you are comparing area, length or population. They rarely rank the same way.

Train the habit

Reading the figures once is not enough to change the mental image. The Geography category of Size It Up draws every country outline at the same scale and asks you to resize one against another, which is the only way to notice how wrong your first instinct was.