EqualGlobe — the world at its true size

How big is Africa, really?

Add country after country and watch how much of it still fits.

1. Africa is 30.37 million km² — nearly a fifth of all the land on Earth. Most maps you've seen don't show it that way.
2. Add the United States. 9.44 million km² more, and there's still most of a continent left over.
3. Add China too — 9.37 million km² — and Africa still has room.
4. Add India. 3.16 million km² more, and the three together still haven't filled it.
5. Add all 27 countries of the European Union — 4.19 million km² of them.
6. The United States, China, India and the EU together: 26.16 million km². Add them all up, and Africa is still bigger.

How small is Greenland, really?

It looks almost as big as Africa. It isn't even close.

1. Greenland, at its true size: 2.15 million km². On most maps, it looks almost as big as Africa.
2. Algeria alone — Africa's biggest country — is already bigger, at 2.32 million km².
3. So is India: 3.16 million km², about half again the size of Greenland.
4. So is Kazakhstan, on the far side of the world from either of them.
5. The United States is more than four times the size of Greenland — not the near-match Mercator suggests.
6. And Africa, where this story started? It's almost fourteen times the size of Greenland.

The Earth's imaginary lines

The lines on every globe: what each one means, and why it is where it is.

1. The Equator runs round the middle of the Earth, halfway between the poles. Everything north of it is the Northern Hemisphere. Everything south of it is the Southern Hemisphere.
2. The Prime Meridian runs from pole to pole through Greenwich, in London. East of it is the Eastern Hemisphere, and west of it is the Western Hemisphere.
3. Together they give every place an address. Lagos is about 6° north of the Equator and 3° east of the Prime Meridian: 6° N, 3° E. The first number is its latitude, the second its longitude.
4. The Tropic of Cancer, 23.4° north. It is the furthest north the Sun can ever be straight overhead, at noon on about 21 June. It crosses the Sahara, India and Mexico.
5. The Tropic of Capricorn, 23.4° south: the furthest south the Sun is ever overhead, on about 21 December. It crosses Brazil, southern Africa and the middle of Australia. The band between the two tropics is "the tropics".
6. The Arctic Circle, 66.6° north. Above it, the Sun stays up all day for at least one day each summer, and does not rise for at least one day each winter. The Antarctic Circle does the same in the south. Why are they exactly there? The next story: the Earth leans.

Why do we have seasons?

Why leaves dry and fall, and why Christmas is in summer in Sydney.

1. The Earth leans over by 23.4°. As it travels round the Sun over a year, the lean keeps pointing the same way, so first the north and then the south tips towards the Sun. The little sun marks where the Sun is straight overhead today.
2. 21 June. The north leans towards the Sun, which is straight overhead on the Tropic of Cancer. Days in the north are long, and it is summer there. Inside the Arctic Circle, the Sun does not set at all.
3. 21 December. Now the south leans towards the Sun, which is overhead on the Tropic of Capricorn. It is summer in Australia and South Africa, and inside the Arctic Circle it stays dark all day.
4. Around 20 March and 22 September, neither half leans towards the Sun. It is overhead on the Equator, and day and night are about 12 hours long everywhere. These two days are the equinoxes.
5. Autumn in the north. Each day the Sun climbs a little less high and sets a little earlier. With less light, trees stop making the green chlorophyll in their leaves, so the yellow and brown underneath show through. Then the leaves dry out and fall, and the tree rests until spring.
6. Near the Equator the Sun is high all year, so there is no cold winter. The seasons are wet and dry instead. In West Africa, from about November the Harmattan wind blows dust in from the Sahara, the air dries out, and many trees drop their leaves too.
7. So the seasons are opposite in the two hemispheres. When it is autumn in London, it is spring in Sydney, and Christmas there falls in summer.

What time is it there?

Why it is morning in New York while it is evening in Tokyo.

1. At noon at Greenwich, in London, the Sun is straight over the Prime Meridian. It moves west 15° every hour, all the way round in 24 hours. So every 15° of longitude is one hour of clock time. The labels along the bottom show the time the Sun gives each place.
2. Cairo is 31° east of London, about two hours further along the Sun's path. So when it is noon at Greenwich, the Sun's clock in Cairo reads about 2 in the afternoon.
3. Tokyo is 140° east, nine hours ahead. At noon at Greenwich it is already 9 in the evening there, and Japan is on the night side of the Earth.
4. New York is 74° west, five hours behind. At noon at Greenwich it is about 7 in the morning in New York, and the Sun has only just come up.
5. Real time zones follow borders, not lines. China is as wide as five zones but uses one clock for the whole country. In the far west of China the Sun is overhead at about 3 in the afternoon by the clock. And many countries move their clocks an hour forward in summer, so the clock and the Sun drift apart a little more.
6. Halfway round the world, at 180°, is where the date changes. Cross it going west and it is tomorrow; going east, it is yesterday. The International Date Line bends around islands so no country is split in two.

Is the Sun ever straight overhead?

Why it never is in London, and why that isn't why the sky is grey.

1. At any moment the Sun is straight overhead at just one spot on Earth. At 11 in the morning at Greenwich it is over Africa, near 15° east. As the Earth turns, that spot slides west 15° every hour, so at the same time each day it comes back to the same longitude.
2. Through the year the spot moves north and south, but never past the tropics. On 21 June it is over the Tropic of Cancer, 23.4° north: in the Sahara, at this hour.
3. On 21 December it is over the Tropic of Capricorn, 23.4° south, in Namibia. So at 11 at Greenwich, all year round, the Sun is overhead somewhere in Africa, which stretches across both tropics along that line.
4. London is at 51.5° north, far outside the tropics, so the Sun is never straight overhead there, or anywhere in the UK. At noon in June it climbs to about 62°. At noon in December it only reaches about 15°.
5. A low Sun spreads its light thin, like a torch shone at a slant, so the ground warms less. And it is up for less of the day: London has about 16½ hours of daylight in June but under 8 in December.
6. The grey skies are something else: the weather. The UK lies in the path of westerly winds off the Atlantic, which bring damp air and rain clouds. Madrid is never under an overhead Sun either, and it is one of the sunniest capitals in Europe.
7. See it for yourself: open the Sun panel and slide through the year. It shows how long the day is where you are, and how high the Sun climbs at noon. Choose a place between the tropics and, on the right day, the noon Sun is straight overhead.

How far is far?

The solar system shrunk onto the Earth, with the Sun in London.

1. Shrink the solar system until Neptune’s path just reaches the far side of the Earth, then put the Sun in London. At this scale the Sun is a ball 5.6 km across, as wide as central London.
2. The Earth goes round 600 km out, about as far as Frankfurt. It is only 51 metres across, the size of an office block, and the Moon circles it 1.5 km away, the size of a house.
3. Mars is 900 km out, past Berlin, and 27 metres across. Mercury and Venus are nearer still, Mercury about as far as Manchester: every rocky planet fits inside Europe.
4. Then a long gap. Jupiter, the giant, is 3,100 km out, in Cyprus: a ball half a kilometre wide, and nothing else for thousands of kilometres around it.
5. Saturn is across the Atlantic, near New York: 5,700 km from the Sun in London, and 470 metres across without its rings.
6. Uranus is in Jakarta, 11,500 km away and 200 metres across. Sunlight, the fastest thing there is, takes 2 hours 40 minutes to get there.
7. Neptune, the last planet, is in New Zealand, 18,000 km from London: nearly the far side of the world. It is 200 metres across, and Voyager 2 took twelve years to fly there.
8. And the nearest star after the Sun? At this scale it would be 160 million km from London, further than the real Sun is from us. Nearly all of space is empty.

A chart for sailors (1569)

Why a chart made for navigators stretches the poles.

In 1569 Gerardus Mercator published a world map "corrected for the use of sailors". Its key idea: a line of constant compass bearing is a straight line, so a navigator can rule a course and follow it. Keeping every angle true forces the map to stretch the world more and more toward the poles.

The stretch is the price of the property, not a flaw. Scale grows with the secant of the latitude and area with its square: at 60°, twice the stretch and four times the area. Greenland, near 72° north, is drawn about ten times too large; DR Congo, on the equator, is barely touched. Here they look alike. In truth DR Congo is the larger.

For three centuries the chart stayed on ships. Once chronometers solved longitude in the 1800s it moved to classroom walls and atlases, a job it was never designed for.

The straight line that isn't the shortest (1802)

Great-circle sailing: the course a ruler on the map won't give you.

A rhumb line, a straight course on Mercator, holds one compass bearing all the way to your destination: turn the ship once and hold the wheel. It is easy to steer and, except along the equator or a meridian, never the shortest way there. In 1802 Nathaniel Bowditch published The American Practical Navigator with tables for the shorter course, one that keeps changing bearing as it goes: the great circle.

A great circle is what you get by slicing the sphere with a plane through its very centre, so its arc between any two points is the shortest path over the surface there is. It is why a flight from London to Los Angeles curves up over Canada on the in-flight map instead of running due west: that curve is the straight line, on a globe.

No flat map can draw every great circle as a straight line and keep every shape and area honest at once, which is exactly this app's recurring theme. Equal Earth bends it, Mercator can make it swing the wrong way entirely, and only the globe shows the arc for what it is: the shortest string you could stretch between two pins on a ball.

The equal-area rebels (1855 to 1973)

Gall, Peters, and the schools that switched.

In 1855 James Gall, a Scottish clergyman, presented a projection that kept areas true and was largely ignored. In 1973 the filmmaker Arno Peters relaunched almost the same projection as the "Peters World Map", framing Mercator as a distortion that shrank the Global South. Cartographers objected to his overclaims; UNESCO, churches and aid agencies adopted the map anyway.

In 1989 seven North American geographic organisations resolved that no rectangular projection should be used for general world maps. Atlases moved to compromise projections: National Geographic to Robinson in 1988, then Winkel Tripel in 1998.

Schools kept the argument alive. Boston Public Schools switched to Gall-Peters in 2017; Nebraska banned Mercator from classrooms in 2024. Norway and Nigeria, highlighted here, are within a factor of three in area. On Mercator, Norway looks like the giant.

One truth, many shapes (1805 to 1923)

Equal-area maps only promise one thing. It is not shape.

Equal-area means a region's size on the map matches its size on the ground, wherever it sits. It says nothing about shape. Mollweide's ellipse, the Gall-Peters rectangle from the last chapter, Equal Earth's rounded outline and Goode's homolosine below are all, mathematically, equally honest about size, and look almost nothing alike.

Karl Mollweide published his ellipse in 1805: longitude lines curving gently from a straight equator to two poles that are each a single point. It never caught on for general maps, shapes feel cramped near its corners, but the maths became the foundation several later projections, Goode's included, are built on.

In 1923 J. Paul Goode combined two projections into one: a sinusoidal band near the equator, where shapes stay closest to true, flanked by Mollweide above and below. He then went further still and cut the whole map open over the oceans, into separate lobes, so no single piece had to stretch as far to stay equal-area. The result looks torn apart. That is deliberate: it is the price of keeping every remaining piece closer to its true shape.

Equal Earth projection, Wikipedia

Goode homolosine projection, Wikipedia

xkcd #977, Map Projections

The web brings Mercator back (2005)

Square tiles put Mercator on every phone.

Google Maps launched on square Mercator tiles. The maths is fast, tiles stack neatly at every zoom, and shapes stay right at street level, exactly what a navigation map needs. Every web map since has copied it. A projection atlases had retired became the most viewed map in history.

The cost only shows when you zoom out. Since 2018 Google Maps on desktop shows a globe at the smallest scales; on phones the flat Mercator world is still the default. Two jobs, one projection, pulling in opposite directions.

EqualGlobe splits them: the world view is equal-area, and far enough in it hands off to a street map, where Mercator's shape-keeping is the right choice. You are at street level over New York now, on Mercator, where it belongs.

Equal Earth (2018)

The projection the UN chose, and what it gives up.

Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson and Bernhard Jenny published Equal Earth in August 2018 as a direct answer to Boston's choice: equal-area, yet it still looks like the world people recognise. Parallels are straight, meridians curve gently, and the rounded outline hints at the sphere. NASA used it within weeks.

The circles are Tissot's indicatrices: identical circles on the ground, each 445 km across, projected onto the map. On Equal Earth every one keeps its area; near the poles they squash into ellipses. That shape cost is what this projection pays instead of Mercator's area cost.

No flat map avoids both. Mercator keeps angles, Equal Earth keeps area, Robinson and Winkel Tripel split the difference. Only a globe keeps everything.

The UN votes 164 to 1 (2026)

164 to 1. What the resolution actually says.

In April 2025 two African non-profits, Africa No Filter and Speak Up Africa, launched "Correct the Map", asking the UN, the World Bank and the BBC to adopt Equal Earth. The African Union endorsed it that August and asked Togo to carry it to New York.

On 4 September 2026 the General Assembly adopted the resolution, 164 votes to 1 with six abstentions. It does not ban Mercator. It encourages governments, schools, international organisations and technology companies to use equal-area projections wherever relative size matters, and to teach the limits of flat maps.

Togo says it will be the first to rewrite its geography textbooks, and will host UNESCO, the African Union and mapping companies in Lomé in 2027. This globe is centred on Togo.