Last updated 14 September 2026.
Countries and boundaries
Country outlines come from Natural Earth's 1:50m admin-0 countries dataset (public domain), pulled fresh from Natural Earth's own repository each time the map is rebuilt, not frozen to one dated release.
Boundary policy is Natural Earth's own de facto lines, not an editorial judgement made here. A handful of limited-recognition or contested territories, Western Sahara, Kosovo, Palestine, Northern Cyprus and Somaliland, are drawn with a dashed outline instead of a solid one and labelled as such. Flags are shown for the first three; Northern Cyprus and Somaliland deliberately aren't given one, since a flag itself would be the contested part.
States and provinces
Where you can compare below the country level, Texas against France, say, that's Natural Earth's 1:50m admin-1 states and provinces dataset, also public domain. Natural Earth only maps this level of detail for nine larger countries; that's their coverage limit, not a choice made here. 294 units in total:
Cities and population
4,235 populated places, from Natural Earth's 1:10m populated places dataset (public domain), power search results and city cards.
Country populations come from that same Natural Earth countries dataset, its own population estimate field, not a separate census pull. They're estimates, current only as of Natural Earth's own data, not a live feed.
How area is calculated
Every area figure on this map, Africa at 29.99 million km², Greenland fourteen times smaller than it looks, is computed on the sphere: the real geodesic area of each outline, not pixels measured off a flat projection. That order matters. The numbers never depended on the drawing, which is the whole reason an equal-area map can be trusted here rather than just asserted.
Street-level maps
Zoom in past country level and the map hands off to real street data: OpenStreetMap (ODbL, © OpenStreetMap contributors), served by OpenFreeMap at no charge. No Google Maps, no Mapbox, no metered API of any kind, a deliberate choice covered on the Roadmap.
Satellite texture
The optional satellite skin (Scene menu) is NASA's Blue Marble: Land Surface, Ocean Color and Sea Ice, a true-colour composite built from MODIS observations aboard the Terra satellite, public domain. It's a photograph of the planet, not a live feed: nothing about where you are or when you're looking changes what it shows.
Citing this map
Any suggested form works, but a stable one:
EqualGlobe. The world at its true size [Equal Earth map]. https://equalglobe.com
Citing a specific view (a comparison, a projection, a place) rather than the map in general? Copy the address bar, it's not a generic homepage link once you've moved from the resting view: everything you're looking at, the projection, the selected country, a comparison, lives in the URL itself.