A 450-year-old drawing trick
In 1569 Gerardus Mercator solved a real problem. A navigator needs a map where a straight line is a straight compass bearing, so a ship can hold one course from harbour to harbour. To make that true, his projection has to stretch land more and more the further it sits from the equator.
It’s an honest trade for sailing. It was never meant to answer "how big is this place, really?" and yet it became the map on classroom walls, in atlases, and later in every web map’s default tile grid, for a question it was never built to answer.
The effect isn't subtle. It falls almost entirely on the countries near the equator, disproportionately on Africa. Drag Africa's real outline onto a Mercator map and the United States, China, India and the entire European Union all fit inside it with room to spare.
Tap a country to drop it in.
It's not just a map. It shapes how people think.
Researchers have studied this directly: shown a Mercator map and asked to rank continents by size, people consistently underrank Africa and South America and overrank Europe and North America. A map is supposed to be a neutral tool. This one, run at true scale for five centuries, quietly nudged a few billion people's sense of the world's proportions in one direction.
That's the argument behind the Gall-Peters projection in the 1970s and 80s, a real, if bruising, debate in cartography that this project's Learn tab covers on its own terms. It's also, more recently, the argument behind a UN resolution.
What changed on 4 September 2026
Two African non-profits, Africa No Filter and Speak Up Africa, started asking the UN, the World Bank and the BBC to adopt an equal-area map by default. The African Union backed it and asked Togo to carry it to the General Assembly. On 4 September 2026, the UN adopted it: 164 votes to 1, six abstentions. It doesn’t ban Mercator. It encourages schools, governments and technology companies to reach for an equal-area projection whenever relative size is the point.
Togo says it will be the first country to rewrite its own geography textbooks, and plans to host UNESCO, the African Union and mapping companies in Lomé in 2027 to help others do the same. We built EqualGlobe the week after the vote, as a real, working answer to "what does that actually look like," not a press release about it.
What EqualGlobe actually is
A map you can fold. Start on Equal Earth, the projection the UN resolution points to, where every country's area is honest. Zoom in and it folds into a globe, so you can see for yourself why no flat map, Equal Earth included, gets everything right at once. Zoom further and it hands off into real street level detail, where Mercator's straight line honesty is exactly what you want back.
Beyond the map: a Compare tool to drag any two countries or historical unions onto each other at true scale, a Learn tab with short chapters and guided stories on the history and maths of projections, and a daily five question Play round for the version of this that's a habit, not a homework assignment.
No accounts. No paywall. No ads. It runs entirely from Natural Earth's public domain geography and OpenStreetMap's street data. Nothing about the world in this app was invented to make a point, including the numbers above.
Who it's for
Built for anyone who needs the true size of a place to matter for a moment. Here's who tends to reach for it, and where each starts.
- Teachers. Project it on the board or hand it to small groups. Compare turns "is Africa really that big?" into five minutes of dragging countries onto each other, no lesson prep, no sign-in, nothing to install.
- Students, and anyone learning alone. Start with Learn: short chapters and two guided stories walk through the history and the maths before Play turns it into a five-question daily habit.
- Writers, editors, and journalists. Compare computes real spherical area, not a guess, and Share turns any comparison into a captioned image or a link with the exact view built into the address, ready to cite, embed, or drop straight into a piece.
- Anyone explaining the 2026 UN vote to someone else. If you're the one telling a colleague, a class, or a group chat why the UN just voted 164 to 1 to move away from Mercator, this page and the map itself take about as long to show as to say.