Why Africa Looks Smaller Than It Really Is

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The full episode is on YouTube, about ten minutes long.

Updated: November 14, 2026

Look at the world map on a classroom wall, and find two places. Greenland sprawls across the top, huge and white, covering the north like a second continent. Africa sits below it, and on that wall the two look about the same size. Generations of schoolchildren have looked at that wall and taken it in without a second thought. Greenland looks as big as Africa. Africa could hold Greenland fourteen times over.

Fourteen Greenlands

Start with what fourteen really means. Imagine Greenland as a single tile, and imagine laying those tiles across Africa, one after another. You lay down the first, and there is still almost the whole continent to go. You lay down the fifth, and you have covered barely a third. It takes fourteen Greenlands to fill Africa, and even then there is a little space left at the edges. That is the size of the gap between the map and the ground.

In 2010, a German graphic designer named Kai Krause drew the point in a single picture that travelled around the world. He took the outline of Africa, and inside it he packed the United States, China, India, and Japan, plus most of Europe, all drawn at their true sizes. They all fit, with room to spare. The United States alone covers about 9.83 million square kilometres. China covers about 9.6 million. India covers about 3.29 million. Put them together and you are still a long way short of Africa.

The sailor's map, 1569

The date behind the pattern is 1569. The name is Gerardus Mercator, a Flemish geographer and mapmaker working in Duisburg, in what is now Germany. That year he published a world map more than two metres wide, printed on eighteen separate sheets, with a Latin title that translates roughly as a new description of the Earth, corrected for the use of sailors. Those last words matter most. Mercator was making a tool for men steering wooden ships across open ocean with nothing but a compass.

Every mapmaker faces the same problem, and it starts with an orange. The Earth is a sphere, and a map is flat. Peel an orange and press the peel flat on a table, and it tears, or it stretches, or it wrinkles. Every flat map has to give up something, shape, or area, or distance, or direction. The only choice is which one to give up. Mercator chose to keep direction true, and to let size go.

The price of that trick is the picture on your classroom wall. To keep the angles true, Mercator had to stretch the map more and more the further you get from the equator. At sixty degrees north, the map shows everything four times its true area. At seventy degrees north, about eight and a half times. At eighty degrees north, about thirty-three times. At the poles the scale becomes infinite, so a Mercator map can never show them at all, and Antarctica stretches into a white band across the bottom. The only line on a Mercator map drawn to true scale is the equator itself. Now put Greenland and Africa on that map. Greenland sits between sixty and eighty degrees north, right where the stretching is at its worst, so it inflates to roughly ten times its true size. Africa straddles the equator, where the map is at its most honest, so it stays close to its real proportions. On your classroom wall the two end up looking like equals.

The map in your head

That question matters because of where we meet these maps. Most of us first learn the shape of the world from a wall in a classroom, years before we can check anything for ourselves. The picture settles in early, and it sticks. Africa comes to look like one modest place on the wall, a single shape among many. In reality, Africa holds 54 recognised countries, more than any other continent, and more than 1.4 billion people, about one person in six alive today.

No perfect map

Here is the honest conclusion, and it is less satisfying than a villain and a hero. There is no perfect flat map of a round world. Mercator tells the truth about direction and stretches area. The Gall-Peters map tells the truth about area and bends shape. Equal Earth splits the difference and gets both mostly right. Mercator maps do exactly what they were built to do. They preserve angles and shapes, and they stretch area to pay for it. The mistake was hanging a sailor's tool on a classroom wall and treating it as a picture of the world.

So next time you look at the wall, remember the numbers. Africa covers about 30.37 million square kilometres. Greenland covers about 2.16 million. Fourteen Greenlands fit inside Africa, along with the United States, China, India, Japan, and most of Europe. Check a globe view, or a true-size comparison, and watch Greenland shrink back to its real size. Once you have seen Africa at its true size, the classroom wall never looks the same again. The map lied about Africa, and it lied for a good reason, to help sailors find their way home. The trick is knowing which lie your map is telling, and when to reach for a different one.